
Book '^ 



.SsCs 



CHARLES SUMNER: 

MEMOIR AND EULOGIES. 

A SKETCH OF HIS LIFE 

BY THE EDITOK, 
AN ORIGINAL ARTICLE BY BISHOP GILBERT HAVEN, 

AND 

THE EULOGIES PRONOUNCED BY EMINENT MEN. 
EDITED BY 

WILLIAM M. CORiXELL, LL.D. 




BOSTON: 
JAMES H. EARLE, 

11 COIINHILL. 

1874. 






Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1874. by 

WILLIAIM M. CORNELL, 
In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. 



Boston : 
Steeeotyped and Pbinted by Rand, Aveky, & Co. 



THE EDITOR'S PREFACE. 



The editor is the writer of the first article in this book ; 
further than this, he is not the author, but the compiler 
of the book. In the death of such a man as Charles 
Sumner, it seems eminently fitting, and of the utmost 
importance to the present and coming generations, that 
the most perfect record possible of his life and deeds 
should be brought together as a work for future reference. 
Such a book must be of great value. The best way to 
accomplish this is to collect together the expressed 
opinions of those who were co-laborers with him, and 
who shared largely in his views and confidence. This is 
the object of the book. The short memoir by the editor 
is the first article. The second is by Rev. Bishop Gilbert 
Plaven, who knew him well, and participated with him in 
the great work of his life, to wit, breaking the chains of 
human bondage. These two sketches of Mr. Sumner 
have been written expressly for this work. 

The address of Hon. N. P. Banks, his friend and 
political colleague in his public services, takes the next 
place. 

3 



4 THE editor's preface. 

Then follow the various eulogies, pronounced by the 
eminent statesmen and patriots selected by cities, towns, 
and numerous bodies, as the best fitted to set forth, be- 
cause they best knew, the character and deeds of that 
remarkable man. Of these, the Hon. Carl Schurz, his 
friend and contemporary in the Senate, leads the way. 
Then follow those of Hon. G. W. Curtis, the Hon. Robert 
B. Elliot, and other prominent gentlemen ; the whole 
forming a volume expressing the various opinions, views, 
and feelings of those most eminentlj' qualified to present 
to the world who Mr. Sumner was, and what he did. 
To bring these documents into one compact and solid 
volume has been the aim of the editor ; and, with some 
confidence that the work will be read, preserved, and 
handed down to posterity by the public, it is sent forth 
to the world. w. M. C. 

Boston, Juue 9, 1874. 



CONTEISTTS. 



Memoir of Chaeles Sumner. By William M. Cornell, LL.D. . 
The Chxefest of our Statesmen. By Bisho}) Gilbert Haven . 
Address in Senate of Massachusetts. By Hon. N. P. Banks 
Eulogy before City Authorities op Boston. 

Bij Hon. Carl Schurz 
EuLOGT before JVIass. State Government. 

By Hon. Geo. Wni. Curtis 
Oration in Faneuil Hall. By Hon. Robert B. Elliott 
Eulogies in U. S. Congress 
By Hon. George S. Boutwell 

Hon. J. S. Morrill 

Hon. A. A. Sargent . 

Hon. H. B. Anthony . 

Hon. E. R. Hoar 

Hon. Henry L. Daivcs 

Hon. J. H. Rniney 

Hon. G. F. Hoar 

Hon. L. Q. C. Lamar 
Addresses in Faneuil Hall, Boston 
By His Honor Mayor S. C. Cobb 

Hon. Richard H. Dana, jun. 

Hon. J. B. Smith 

Hon. Alexander H. Rice . 

Letter from Vice-President Wilson 



Page 

7 
41 
85 

97 

165 

227 

249 

254 
262 
273 
276 
284 
291 
300 
310 

318 
321 
329 
331 
355 



MEMOIR OF CHAELES SUMNEE. 

By WM. M. CORNELL, LL.D. 

This brief sketch is given merely as an introduc- 
tion to tlie noble eulogies and high praise contained 
in what follows it. 

Chaeles Sumner was born in Boston, Jan. 6, 
1811. He died in Washington, D.C., March 11, 1874. 

It is not designed in this brief memoir to give 
the lives of his parents or ancestors. Suffice it to 
say, they were worth}^ respectable, and good citizens 
of the " Old Bay State." This is not a memoir of 
them, however deserving they may have been : it is 
of Charles Sumner, the scholar, the gentleman., the 
man of ^;cace, the advocate of justice, the senator, the 
friend of his race, the champion of universal freedom, 
the incorruptible statesman, and the admiration of the 
world. 

" Honor and shame from no condition rise. 
Act well your part : there all the honor lies." 

I never could see the propriety or necessity, in writ- 
ing a memoir of any man, of beginning with the first- 

7 



8 lIEMOm OF CHAELES SUMNEE. 

named of that family, and tracing his lineage back to 
Adam. But two cases are to Ije found in the records 
of our nation, where the loss has been so great, and the 
sorrow so universal, as in the decease of Senator 
Sumner. Those cases were the death of George Wash- 
ington, M^ell termed " the Father of his Country," 
and Abraham Lincoln, our martyr president. His 
part in the history of our nation Charles Sumner has 
acted well ; or our most talented and eminent men 
have been greatly deceived in the testimony they 
have borne to his worth, and the nation has mourned 
in vain. 

THE SCHOL^\Jl. 

Mr. Sumner commenced his scholastic studies in 
a public school of his native city. He entered the 
public Latin School of Boston before he was ten 
years old. Here he gained honors in various de- 
partments, and obtained prizes and medals. He 
finished his preparation for college at Phillips Acad- 
emy, then renowned for fitting j'oung men for the 
university. At college he stood high among his 
classmates, and graduated honorably in 1830. After 
his graduation he still studied another 3'ear at Cam- 
bridge, with private tutors.* He then entered the 
Cambridge Law School, where that eminent jurist, 
Judge Stor}', became his patron and friend, and pre- 



MEMOIR OF CHARLES STJMNER. 9 

dieted for him a brilliant career. He became the 
librarian of the law library ; and how well he used, 
and how carefully he studied, the historical part of it, 
has been attested by the unusual facility with which 
he elucidated his numerous speeches during his whole 
life. In history he was an encyclopcedia, the ad- 
miration of all his coadjutors, who all dipped into 
him, as into an antediluvian, to know what hap- 
pened before the flood, or in any subsequent age. 

While pursuing the study of law, he found time to 
write many articles for " The American Jurist ; " and 
so much were they admired, that he was solicited to 
edit that journal ; which he did to the great satisfac- 
tion of its readers. 

He was admitted to the bar in 1834, and soon had 
a lucrative practice. As the favorite pupil of Judge 
Story, he was appointed reporter of the United States 
Circuit Court, of wliich Story was one of the judges. 
Three huge volumes of the decisions of that court 
made young Sumner well known to the gentlemen 
of the bar. As an assistant to Judge Story and to 
Prof. Greenleaf, he lectured, in their absence, to 
the class, and was offered a professorship in the 
school; which he declined. 

Not satisfied with his present popularity, great as 
it was for a young man, he now went abroad. Intro- 
duced, as he was, by letters from Story and other 



\ 



10 MEMOIR OF CHARLES SUMNER. 

eminent gentlemen, lie was received with great cor- 
diality by tlie judges and lawyers of Westminster 
Hall. He was everywhere honored ; and the s^Dlen- 
did libraries of England were placed at his disposal ; 
and for one year he was a regular attendant on the 
debates in parliament. On the same tour he visited 
Germany and Italy, conversing with their learned 
men, and accumulating stores of knowledge for fu- 
ture use. He remembered these years of study, 
society, and accumulation of artistic acquisition, with 
great joy during the active years of manhood. As 
he then enjoyed the society of the most cultivated 
minds both of men and women, and feasted his eyes 
on all the beauties of Nature among her most sunny 
skies, and all the wonders of Art among her greatest 
artists, it was not singular that he should speak of 
them as his halcyon days, and as oases in his life. He 
was no idle spectator while thus abroad, but employed 
his time to the best possible advantage, both by the 
study of books and men. With his exquisitely fine 
taste, he selected, thus early in life, many of those, 
artistic paintings and engravings which became such 
a passion Avith him in later years, and which so richly 
adorned every part of his house at the capital. 

It may be said, without fear of contradiction, that 
no finer scholar than Charles Sumner could be found 
among us, as he came forth from old Harvard, and as 



MEMOIR OF CHARLES SUMNER. 11 

he now returned from the classic fields and sunny 
skies of the Old World. He was then known chiefly as 
a scholar, as a learned man ; not as the noble senator, 
the conservator, the savior of the nation from shame, 
and of the colored race from brutality and degrada- 
tion. He was admired as the scholar ; but his future 
career was then unknown. 

THE GENTLEMAN. 

Mr. Sumner was a true gentleman. He was re- 
fined in his manners, courteous towards all in his de- 
portment, affable to his friends, fixed in his opinions, 
determined to " stick " to what was right, averse to 
all that was wrong ; yet in all his associations with 
others, though he sometimes appeared stern, he was 
ever the true gentleman. He never violated the laws 
of etiquette, never descended to vulgarity, never 
treated an inferior so as to make him feel liis inferior- 
ity, never bowed obsequiously to any one in office 
when he could not consent to his conduct. In his 
most ardent and castigating speeches, he never 
forgot that he held a high position, and that he 
Was a senator of the United States of America. 
When accosted upon any question by any ordinary 
man, or any citizen, he paid the utmost attention to. 
his request, and lent a willing ear to what he had to 
say. The writer knew him well ; had visited him 



12 MEMOm OF CHAELES SUTVINER. 

at liis residence in Boston, at his home in Washing- 
ton, in the Senate Chamber, and on occasional lec- 
tures ; and there was no reason why he should have 
treated him more gentlemanly than he did others : 
yet on no occasion did he ever appear any thing 
otherwise than the courteous, urbane, true gentle- 
man. 

THE MAN OF PEACE. 

July 4, 1844 (the birthday of our nation), Charles 
Sumner appeared in a new character. It was at a 
time when slavery was at its height, and when it 
threatened to rule supreme in the nation ; and when 
there was more slave-property in Boston than in some 
of the large cities of the South ; and when to speak a 
word against slavery was as treasonaljle an offence, in 
the view of men of wealth and standing at the North, 
as was Toryism in the Revolution; when William Lloyd 
Garrison had been dragged through our streets with 
a rope around his neck, and no men of wealth and 
influence espoused his cause ; when the nation was 
blind to its influence, and Congress made laws only 
for its extension and j)erpetuity ; when the Northern 
pre^s and Northern pulpit were both dumb on the 
subject ; when an imperious man-stealer boasted that 
he would call the roll of his slaves under the shadow 
of Bunker-Hill jMonument ; when the giant minds of 
Northern statesmen bowed before this modern Mo- 



MEMOm OF CHARLES SUMNER. 13 

loch ; when to be called an " abolitionist " was as dis- 
graceful in the eyes of Boston merchants as it was in 
South Carolina ; and when to utter a syllable against 
slavery in Faneuil Hall, "the Cradle of Liberty," was 
treason against the Constitution, of the blackest dye, 
— at this time, on the day of our nation's jubilee, 
Charles Sumner stood forth before a Boston audi- 
ence, and proclaimed his subject, " The True Gran- 
deur of Nations ; " and this grandeur was peace. And 
the burden of that oration was, there can be no peace 
to a wicked nation. 

It is now more than thirty years since that youth- 
ful orator stood up before a Boston audience, and pro- 
claimed the great truth, "In our age, there can be 
no peace that is not honorable ; there can be no war 
that is not dishoiiorable." 

Never shall I forget that address, nor the expres- 
sion of a young lady sitting by my side, who said, 
" That is such a man as I would like for a husband." 
I wondered where he found so much to say on the 
subject of " Peace ; " and great men of the Old World, 
even, wondered at that oration, " the noblest contri- 
bution any modern writer ever made to the cause of 
peace." I do not think, in all the speeches of Mr. 
Sumner, he ever shone more brilliantly than in this 
oration. But two of the aldermen were abolition- 
ists ; and the others, all the city fathers, and, indeed, 

2 



14 MEMOIR OF CHARLES SUMNER. 

all the wealth and influence of Boston, were on the 
other side. Before this audience Charles Sumner 
presented himself, known only as a young, rising, 
aristocratic lawyer, the pride of Harvard, admired 
by both the professors and students of the Law 
School, as unusually versed in law and science. 

His theme was different from any one ever pre- 
sented to such an audience, on such a day ; and he 
poured forth a torrent of eloquence which astounded 
and angered many of his hearers. Influenced solely 
by principle, he had girded himself for a mighty con- 
test, which he probably expected, and in which he 
was not disappointed. Usually the war of the Rev- 
olution, on this day, had been commended, and its 
heroes almost deified. Beyond a doubt, most of this 
briUiant assembly expected a similar -deification. But 
the young orator soon undeceived them, by showing 
that war was "the embodiment of cruelty, waste, 
unsuited to rational beings, and repugnant to the 
gospel of Christ ; that all nations ought immediately 
to disband their armies, and dismantle their war- 
ships ; and that our nation should take the lead in 
this God-hke and philanthropic movement, and agree 
to settle all national disputes by arbitration." 

The war with Mexico, for the occupation and an- 
nexation of Texas, was then strongly talked of, for 
the extension of slavery. With all the energy of a 



MEMOIR OF CHARLES SUMNER. 15 

young enthusiast, he put this question, " Who believes 
that tlie honor of the nation would be promoted by 
a war with Mexico ? A war with Mexico would be 
mean and cowardly." And then, branching off to the 
subject in which his life was to be spent, he added, 
"And when the day shall come — may these eyes be 
gladdened by its beams ! " (and I add, they were) — 
" that shall witness the emancipation of three million 
fellow-men, guilty of a skin not colored like our own, 
now, in the land of jubilant freedom, bound in 
gloomy bondage, — then will there be a victory by 
the side of which that of Bunker Hill will be as 
the farthing candle held up to the sun." 

The effect of this speech was felt and seen at the 
dinner-table afterwards. One said, wars were neces- 
sary. R. C. Winthrop, then a member of Congress, 
well knowing the mind of that body respecting the 
annexation of Texas, gave the following toast: " Our 
country : however bounded, still our country ; 
to be defended at all hazards." Another gentleman 
present, always famed for following the popular side 
of any question, considered the oration as inculcat- 
ing wrong ideas,, and, in differing from it, openly 
advocated the military equipment of our country. 
Others followed in a similar strain. Not a solitary 
one said a word in favor of the oration. Here was 
a spectacle worth beholding, — a gifted son of Massa- 



16 MEMOIR OF CHAELES SFMNER. 

chusetts standing for peace against the whole influ- 
ence of Boston. 

Tliere, at that city dinner, was the most sub- 
lime scene that ever transpired at such a dinner ; for 
amid the reproaches that fell upon and the arrows 
shot at him, enough to Low any ordinary man, the 
young orator arose, and remarked, there was a 
part of the perfarmances of the day in which we 
were all agreed : it was the 7nusic of the children's 
voices ! How noble was this ! What a fine speci- 
men of the princijDle of peace he had been recom- 
mending ! — not a word of reproach, not a single 
recrimination. Paul on Mars Hill, in the midst 
of ancient Athens, when called a "babbler" by the 
wise men, was scarcely more grand and sublime 
than young Sumner, when, by these pacific words, 
he turned the attention of these great men of our 
modern Athens to a new subject, — the beautifid 
A'^oices of the children. 

There were flights of eloquence in that oration to 
be admired ; but its greatness consisted in the noble 
Christian principle it advocated. " War," said he, 
" stripped of all delusive apology, falls from glory 
into barbarous guilt, taking its place among bloody 
transgressions, while its flaming honors are turned 
into shame." 

He proposed that " all the vast resources accumu- 




THE EARLY HOME OF CHARLES SUMNER, 

No. 20 Hanxock St., Boston. 

Now ihe Residence of the Hon. Thomas Russell. 



MEMOIR OF CHABLES SUMKER. 17 

lated for waging war should be turned into channels 
of peace, — to schools, churches, hospitals; and our 
soldiers into teachers and messengers of mercy. 
This is the cheap defence of nations. The angels 
of the Lord will throw over the land an invisible but 
impenetrable panoply." 

The grand sentiments of this address, though dis- 
approved by the rich and arrogant men of Boston, 
were fully approved of and indorsed by John 
A. Andrew, John Quincy Adams, and by Richard 
Cobden, the great apostle of peace, and Rogers, 
the poet of the Old World. All of them wrote 
letters of commendation to him. Sumner was now 
fairly launched upon the stormy sea of politics and 
statesmanship ; not because he had sought it, but 
because his principles were right, and those of the 
politicians wrong. 

It would be pleasant to make long quotations from 
this oration on " Peace ; " but our limits will not 
allow it. 

CHARLES SUMKER THE ADVOCATE OP JUSTICE. 

Four months of agitation about his Peace Oration 
only had passed, when we find him at a public 
meeting in Faneuil Hall, called by and for all good 
citizens opposed to the admission of Texas as a 

2* 



18 MEMOIR OF CHABLES SUMNER. 

State, and presided over by Hon. Charles Francis 
Adams. 

The battle between slavery and freedom was now 
fully opened. The slaveocracy had thus far tri- 
umphed. Texas had been admitted as a Territory. 
The advocates of slavery were defiant and strong. 
They were not to be baffled in their attempts to 
extend it. Men in Boston were as arrogant in its 
defence as men in Charleston, S.C. The Whig 
party had so far succumbed to it, that John Quincy 
Adams had written a letter to Dutee J. Pearce, a 
Democrat of Rhode Island, that the Whigs were 
always ready to crush any man who had more prin- 
ciiDle than they had. Rufus Choate, the eloquent 
advocate, like Daniel Webster, " the Defender of the 
Constitution," had said, in a poHtical meeting in 
Boston, when occasion led him to speak of John 
Quincy Adams, "I- should say the last Adams," 
meaning, as a slur, that Charles Francis, who was 
to preside at this meeting, was unworthy the name 
of an Adams. To which Adams made this fine 
retort, that brought down the house : " It takes 
considerable to maintain the reputation of some fam- 
ilies, while a small moiety is quite enough for oth- 
ers." Considering that Rufus was the only man 
of the name of Choate that had ever risen to emi- 
nence, this was indeed a " thrust under the fifth 
rib." 



MEMOIR OF CHARLES SUMNER. 19 

At this meeting appeared Charles Sumner hand 
in hand with Wendell Philhps and William Lloyd 
Garrison. The "men of wealth and standing" in 
Boston cared not a fig about Garrison. It was all 
the same to them, whether he had a rope about liis 
neck, or a cotton handkerchief: anyhow, he was 
beneath their notice. But that Charles Sumner, 
their pet child, the eminent scholar, the true gentle- 
man, the admired and commended law-lecturer, the 
friend of Story, and Chancellor Kent ; and Wendell 
Phillips, the most eloquent man of the day, belong- 
ing to one of the most honored and conservative 
families of this ancient Commonwealth, — that these 
men should appear there with such a rabble, to advo- 
cate such a cause : this was too much. Having no 
principle to guide them, as John Quincy Adams said, 
this was a conundrum .they could not understand ; 
and, when Charles Sumner offered the following 
resolution, they were shocked : — 

'^ Be it Resolved, — In the name of God, of Christ, and hu- 
manity, that "we, belonging to all political parties, and reserving 
all other reasons of objection, imite in protest against the ad- 
mission of Texas into the United States as a slave State." 

He accompanied this with strong and pertinent 
remarks, some of which were as follows : — 

" Congress is asked to sanction the constitution 



20 MEMOIR OF CHARLES SUMNER. 

of Texas, which not only supports slavery, but con- 
tains a clause prohibiting the legislature of the State 
from abolishing slavery. In doing this, it will give 
a fresh stamp of legislative approbation to an un- 
righteous system; it will assume a new and active 
responsibility for this system; it again becomes 
a dealer in human flesh, and on a gigantic scale. At 
this moment, when the conscience of mankind is at 
last aroused to the enorm^ity of holding a fellow-man 
in bondage, when, throughout the civilized world, a 
slave-dealer is a by-word and a reproach, we, as a 
nation, are about to become prox3rietors in a large 
population of slaves." 

In reference to action in this cause, he said, " But 
we cannot fail to accomplish great good. It is in 
obedience to a prevailing law of Providence, that no 
act of self-sacrifice, of devotipn to duty, of humanity, 
can fail. It stands forever as a landmark, from 
which, at least, to make a new effort. . . . Massa- 
chusetts must continue foremost in the cause of free- 
dom ; nor can her children yield to deadly dalliance 
with slavery." 

I love to dwell upon and to quote from this speech, 
because it seems the starting-ground of his life's 
battle Avith slavery, which he lived to see abohshed. 
He said, "God forbid that the votes and voices 
of the North should help to bind anew the fetters 



MEMOTK OF CHAP.LES SUMNER. 21 

of the slave ! God forbid that the lash of the slave- 
dealer should be nerved by any sanction from New 
England ! God forbid that the blood which spurts 
from the lacerated, quivering flesh of the slave 
should soil the hem of the white garments of Massa- 
chusetts ! 

" Let Massachusetts continue to be known as 
foremost in the cause of freedom ; and let none 
of her children yield to the fatal dalliance with 
slavery. 

"You will remember the Arabian story of the 
magic mountain, under whose irresistible attraction 
the iron bolts which held together the strong timbers 
of a stately ship were drawn out, till the whole fell 
apart, and became a disjointed wreck. Do we not 
find in this story an image of what happens to many 
Northern men, under the potent magnetism of South- 
ern companionship or Southern influence ? Those 
principles which constitute the individuality of the 
Northern character, which render it stanch, strong, 
and seaworthy, which bind it together as with iron, 
are drawn out one by one, like the bolts from the 
ill-fated vessel ; and out of the. miserable, loosened 
fragments is formed that human anomaly, a North- 
ern man with Southern principles. Such a man is no 
true son of Massachusetts." 

The burden of his speech against the annexation 



f>2 MEMom or chasi-es sttoteb. 

of Texas "vras the injastaee of the act : and tims it 
Tras for jostiee lie "wras plea-ding. How great mxist 
Lare been SmmieT's lore of jostiee. to speak as lie 
did -sdien sneii men as Webster and Ererett and 
Wintirop, those giants of Massachusetts, "were all 
opposed to has Tiew^! He mi^'Li "vrell be called 
" Aristides, the Just-" After Trar with Mexico was 
declared, and Egbert C. Winthrop, onx representa- 
tare in Congress, had xoted for it, how zealonsly did 
Charles Snmner belabor him on this xexr subject 
of justiee, or, lather, the total want, of it in that 
wax ! In that iam<ms letter he smA. — 

•" The act [declaration of war] gixes the sanction 
of Congress to an urtjuid war. War is barbarous 
and bratal : but this is nnjust- It grows out of ag- 
gression on our part, and is continued by aggression. 
It declares that "war exists hy tlu: aei of ike, BepMic 
of Mexii!o: it is a national lie. The war is dishon- 
orable and eowardlr, as being the attack of a rich, 
powerful, numerous, and united republic upon a 
weak and defenceless neighbor distracted by civil 
feuds- Every oonsideration of true honor, manli- 
ness, and Chnstian duty prompted gentleness and 
forbearance towai-ds our unfortunate sLsteT." 

After much more to the ^me effect, about the 
injuBtiee and baseness of the war, ^Ir. Sumner wrote 
to Mr. Winthrop, " Such, sir, is the act of Congress 



MEMOm OF CHAELES STTitSTIB. 23 

which received vonr sanction. It will hanJly yield 
in importance to any measure of onr government 
since the adoption of the Federal Constimtion. It 
is certainly the most wicked in onr history, as it is 
- one of the most wicked in aU history. The record- 
ing Mnse will drop a tear over its tnrpitade and 
injustice, while she gibbets it for the disgnst and 
reprobation of mankind. 

" Such, sir, is the act of Congress to which, by 
your affirmative vote, the people of Boston have 
been made parties. Through yyu they have been 
made to declare an unjust and ef>icar>Ily war with 
falsehood, in the eau*e of slavery. Through ycu they 
have been made partakers in the blockade of Vera 
Cruz, in the seizure of California, in the capture 
of Santa Fe. in the bloodshed of Monterey. It were 
idle to snppose that the poor soldier or officer only 
is stained by this guilt. It reaches £ir back, and 
incarnadines the halls of Congress. Xay. more : 
Through you it reddens the hands of your e-onstitu- 
ents in Boston. Pardon this language. Strong as 
it may seem, it is weak to express the aggravation 
of your act in Joining in the deeiaration of an WKj'tt^ 
ir. O Mr. Winthrop! rather than lend your 
vote to this wickedness, you should have suffered 
the army of the United States to pass submissively 
through the Caudine Forks of Mexioan power. — :o 



24 MEMOIR OF CHARLES SUMNER. 

perish, it miglit be, irretrievably, like tlie legions 
of Varus. Their bleached bones in the distant val- 
leys where they were waging an unjust war would 
not tell to posterity such a tale of ignominy as this 
lying act of Congress. 

"Another apology, suggested by yourself, and 
vouchsafed by your defenders, is founded on the 
alleged duty of voting succor to Gen. Taylor's troops, 
and the impossibility of doing this without voting 
also for the bill, after it had been converted into 
a declaration of falsehood and of war. It is said that 
patriotism required this vote. Patriotism ! is not 
thy name profaned by this apology ? Let one of j^our 
honored predecessors, sir, a representative of Boston 
on the floor of Congress (Mr. Quincy), give the reply 
•to this apology. On an occasion of trial not unlike 
that through which you have passed, and in the 
same place, he gave utterance to these noble 
words." 

These " noble words " were spoken by Josiah 
Quincy, sen., of Boston, and need not be quoted in 
this place. 

How strong must have been Mr. Sumner's abhor- 
rence of slavery, his sense of justice, and anxiety 
that the right might triumph, to write such a letter 
to R. C. Winthrop, his former friend ! Few men, it 
is believed, can be found, that would take such 



MEMOIR OF CHARLES SUMNER. 25 

a noble stand. Wendell Phillips, referring to him- 
self before he was an aljolitionist, says, " Then I was 
a respectable man ; " and Charles Sumner, before he 
took such a stand, was respected and admired by all 
the leading men of Boston, and by the Whig leaders 
in particular. 

As this letter was really the pith and marrow 
of Charles Sumner's after life, I must be allowed to 
make one more quotation from it. When Cicero 
said, " My family begins with me, and I am writing 
for immortality," he said nothing more true, or more 
important to his fame, than Mr. Sumner did in this 
famous letter, every sentence of which was pregnant 
with truth, and flaming with justice. Hear it: 
*' Let me add, that, in other respects, your course 
lias been in disagreeable harmony with your vote on 
the Mexican War Bill. I cannot forget — for I sat 
by your side at the time — that, on the 4th of July, 
1845, in Faneuil Hall, you extended the hand of fel- 
lowship to Texas, although she had not jQt been 
received among the States of the Union. I cannot 
forget the toast which you uttered on the same occa- 
sion, by which you have connected your name with 
an epigram of dishonest patriotism. I cannot forget 
your apathy at a later day, when many of your con- 
stituents entered upon holy and constitutional efforts 
to o^^pose the admission of Texas with a slaveJulding 



26 MEMOIR OF CHAELES SUMNER. 

constitution, — conduct strangely inconsistent with 
your recent avowal of ' uncompromising hostility to 
all measures for introducing new slave States and 
new slave Territories into the Union.' Nor can I 
forget the ardor with which you devoted yourself to 
the less important question of the tariff, indicating 
the relative position of the two questions in your 
nimd. As I review your course, the vote on the 
Mexican War Bill seems to be the dark consum- 
mation. 

•' And now let me ask you, when you resume your 
seat in Congress, to bear your testimony at once, 
without hesitation or delay, against the further pros- 
ecution of this war. Forget for a while the sub- 
treasury, the veto, even the tariff; and remember 
this wicked war. With the eloquence which you 
command so easily, and which is j'our pride, call for 
the instant cessation of hostilities. Let your cry be 
that of Falkland in the civil wars, ' Peace, peace ! ' 
Think not of what you have called in your speeches 
* an honorable peace.' 

" There can be no peace with Mexico which will 
not be more honorable than this war. Every fresh 
victory is a fresh dishonor. ' Unquestionably,' you 
have, strangely said, ' we must not forget that IMexico 
must be willing to negotiate.' No, no, Mr. Win- 
throp ! We are not to wait for IMcxico. Her con- 



MEMOIR OF CHARLES SUlSmER. 27 

sent is not needed ; nor is it to be asked by a 
Christian statesman, while our armies are defiling 
her soil by their aggressive footsteps. 

" She is passive : we alone are active. Stop the 
war. Withdraw our forces. In the words of Col. 
Washington, ' Retreat, retreat ! ' By so doing, we 
shall cease from further wrong, and peace will 
ensue. 

" Let me ask you, sir, to remember in your public, 
the rules of right which you obey in your private 
capacit}^. The principles of morals are the same for 
nations and for individuals. Pardon me, if I suggest 
that you do not appear to have acted invariably in 
accordance with this truth. You would not, in your 
private capacity, countenance wrong, even in your 
friend or your child ; but, as a representative, you 
have pledged yourself not to withhold your vote 
from any reasonable supplies which may be called 
for in the prosecution of this wicked war. Do by 
your country as by your child. You would not fur- 
nish to him means of offence against his neighbors : 
do not furnish them to your country. Do not vote 
for any supplies to sustain this unrighteous purpose. 
Again : you would not hold slaves. I doubt not you 
would join with Mr. Palfrey in emancipating any 
who should become yours by inheritance or other- 
wise. But I have never heard of your joining, in 



28 MEMOIR OF CHAELES SUMNER. 

efforts or sympathy, with those who seek to carry 
into our institutions that practical conscience which 
declares it to be equally wrong in individuals and in 
States to sanction slavery." 

CHARLES SUMNER THE SENATOR. 

Passing over many good things that Mr. Sumner 
said and did, as our space is limited, I come to his 
senatorship. He had never sought office, but office 
sought him. He seemed to have made up his mind 
to be a scholar, a gentleman, a friend of peace, an 
advocate of justice ; and determined to do what good 
he could in a private way, laboring to ameliorate the 
condition of the prisoner, and to advance the interest 
of our public schools. Up to this time he had acted 
only as a private citizen. Now he was to be a ser- 
vant of the State, and to fill an important niche in 
the senate-chamber of the nation. Who would have 
predicted, when he wrote to Robert C. Winthrop, 
as we have seen, that he would step over him in the 
national government ? or, when he besought Daniel 
Webster to do his duty as a senator, he would have 
been called by Massachusetts to take the chair of 
Webster in the capital of the nation ? 

Mr. Sumner's friends, however, did not elect him 
to this high office without a struggle. 

Three political parties were then struggling for pre- 



MEMOIR OF CHARLES SUMNER. 29 

eminence, — the Whigs to beat the Democrats, the 
Democrats the Whigs, and the Free-soilers to unite 
with that party which would do the most for free- 
dom. 

A "coalition" took place. The Democrats, in 
s-eneral, were to have the State offices, and the Free- 
soilers the United States senator. But this was not 
to be done without a battle. The Whigs had long 
ruled Massachusetts. They were unwilling to give 
up the reins : in a word, "they died hard." Their 
groans were terrific, their throes agonizing. But all 
the " coalition" candidates were elected, — George S. 
Boutwell, governor ; Henry Wilson, president of the 
Senate ; N. P. Banks, speaker of the House. 

R. C. Winthrop was the candidate of the Whigs, 
Charles Sumner the candidate of the " coalition." 
Thus marshalled, these forces went forth to the con- 
test, which was decided Jan. 22, 1851, in the Senate, 
by a single vote, Mr. Sumner receiving twenty-three 
votes, Mr. Winthrop fourteen, and one scattering. 

As just said, the Whigs had no idea of dying an 
easy death; and the battle was transferred to the 
House. Here, on the first ballot, Mr. Sumner wanted 
but five votes of being elected; but it took three 
months, and twenty-six ballotings, to get these other 
five votes. But after seizing upon every straw that a 
dying man will catch at, after voting viva voce, by 

3* 



30 MEMOIR OF CHARLES SUMNER. 

ballot, by yeas and nays, and finally in sealed enve- 
lopes, the backbone of the Whig party was broken, 
and Charles Sumner was chosen. He would have 
no exulting that evening over his fallen opposers, but 
took himself away out of the city. But his quiet 
disposition did not soften the wrath of his opponents. 
Some of his literary friends would not speak to him. 
" The Daily Advertiser " said, " It is the grossest 
outrage upon the feelings of the majority of the 
people of the State, by a combination between two 
minorities, which we have known to be perpetrated 
in any of the States of the Union. We regard the 
event as a most unfortunate one for the reputation of 
the State." 

" The Transcript " said, " The mountain that has 
been laboring for three months has brought forth ; 
and Charles Sumner, Esq., has been elected for six 
years to succeed Mr. Webster in the Senate of the 
United States. This will be a sore disappointment to 
the Whig party," &c. 

"The Courier" said, "We need hardly say that 
the election of Mr. Sumner will be regretted by all 
who wish the State of Massachusetts to stand, where 
she has stood, nobly and firmly fixed in her loyalty to 
the American Union." 

Mr. Sumner was reviled by all the so-called national 
papers of the Union in other States, as well as in his 



MEMOIR OF CHARLES SUMNER, 31 

own. But he pursued his onward and upward course, 
not even replying to any of the vituperative attacks 
made upon him. True, he was consoled by words of 
encouragement from such men as John Quincy 
Adams, the poet Whittier, and some others. 

Modestl}^ he accepted his credentials, saying, " I 
accept the senatorship as the servant of Massachu- 
setts. I see my duty : I dare not shrink from it." 

He entered upon his duties in the Senate, Dec. 
1, 1851, at the opening of the Thirty-second Con- 
gress. As a Free-soiler, he did not stand entirely 
alone, though but two could be thus numbered with 
him. These were Salmon P. Chase of Ohio, and 
John P. Hale of New Hampshire. 

The first speech Mr. Sumner made in the Senate 
sounded the knell of slavery. It was inspired by a 
petition from the denomination of Friends, of New 
England, against the Fugitive Slave Bill. He pre- 
sented it on the 26th of May, 1852, six months after 
he had entered the senate-chamber. He had pre- 
pared a speech to accompany the petition ; but he was 
not allowed to deliver it. A large majority of the 
Senate were opposed to it ; and, though he narrowly 
watched every opportunity, it was not till the 26th 
of August that the speech was delivered. The 
rules of the House then giving him the floor, he 
took it, and held it, in the face of much opposi- 



6Z MEMOIB OP CHARLES SUMNER. 

tion, four mortal hout's. They were hours of torture 
to the slaveholders, but of maddened anguish to 
every Northern senator with Southern prinoiples. I 
have no room to reproduce that speech, nor is it 
necessary. It is to be found in all his works, and 
will be read as long as a free American lives to read. 
It stirred to wrath the greater part of both houses 
of Congress. It put new thoughts into the heart and 
mind of the nation, and foreshadowed what was to 
come, and what has since come now in 1874, — the 
emancipation of every slave. Charles Sumner thus 
stood forth, where Webster had become a fallen arch- 
angel, and where, as John Randolph would say, 
enough other Northern dough-faces had ever voted 
with the South to make them the rulers of the na- 
tion ; there Charles Sumner, fully aware of liis posi- 
tion, said, " With me, sir, there is no alternative. 
Painfully convinced of the unutterable wrongs and 
woes of slavery ; profoundly believing, that accordr 
ing to the true spirit of the Constitution, and the sen- 
timents of the fathers, it can find no place under our 
national government ; that it is in every respect sec- 
tional ; that it is always and everywhere the creature 
and dependant of the States, and never an}^where the 
creature and dependant of the nation ; and that the 
nation can never, by legislative or other act, impart 
to it any support, under the Constitution of the 



MEMOIB OF CHARLES SUMNER. 33 

United States, — full well I know, sir, the difficulties 
of this discussion. Full well I know that I am in a 
small minority, with few here to whom I may look 
for sympathy or support. The favor and the good- 
will of my fellow-citizens, of my brethren of the 
Senate, sir, I am ready, if required, to sacrifice. All 
that I am, or may be, I freely offer to this cause." 

Then, after stating that he was a man of peace, 
that he had never sought office, and no party man, 
lie proceeded with his speech. 

Mr. Sumner differed from Mr. Garrison as to the 
Constitution of the United States. He was bent 
upon the destruction of slavery under the Constitu- 
tion ; and he fully demonstrated, in this remarkable 
speech, that he was in the right. Mr. Garrison was 
for destroying the Constitution, that he might de- 
stroy slavery. Sumner took the right ground ; and, 
had the South fought under the Constitution, they 
would have been much wiser than they were. 

Here, as in his address on Peace, Mr. Sumner was 
commended by Mr. Hale of Ncav Hampshire, and 
Gen. Scott, who wrote to him, " Your speech is an 
admirable one, — a great, a very great one. That is 
my opinion ; and everybody around me, of all sorts, 
confess it." 

Mr. Chase wrote to him, "I have read, as well as 
heard, your truly great speech. Hundreds of thou- 



34 MEMOIR OF CHARLES STTMNER. 

sands will read it ; and everywliere it will carry 
conviction to all willing to be convinced, and will 
infuse a feeling of incertitude, and fearful looking 
for judgment, in the minds of those who resist the 
light, and toil in the harness of party platforms, irrec- 
oncilable with justice." 

Henry Wilson wrote, " I have read your glorious 
speech. How proud I am that God gave me the 
power to aid in placing you in the Senate ! You 
have exhausted the question. Hereafter all that can 
be said will be to repeat your speech." 

Everybody opposed to slavery praised this speech ; 
and to this day it has never been equalled. 

On his return to Boston he was the head of the 
Free-soil party ; and all looked up to him as a leader. 

It would be pleasant to follow Mr. Sumner through 
his nearly three terms as a senator ; to speak of the 
great work that he did, and the great esteem in 
which he was held by every friend of liberty at home 
and abroad. But, as his life's work is fully expressed 
in the eulogies and addresses that follow, it is wholly 
unnecessary to recount the great speeches and noble 
deeds of his senatorial life. 

CHARLES SUMISTER THE FRIEND OF HIS RACE. 

It requires but a word on this point ; for his whole 
life shows, that, from the time of his first public 



MEMOIR OF CHARLES SUMNER. 



35 



address before tlie city authorities of Boston, upon 
peace, and against war, down to his last act and 
dying wish about his Civil Rights BiU, his life was 
one entire effort for the good, the elevation, of the 
human race, whoUy irrespective of color, birth, resi- 
dence, climate, or nation. All were his brethren. 
All shared in his philanthropy. 

CHARLES SUMNER THE CHAMPION OF UNIVERSAL 
LIBERTY. 

No man ever espoused the cause of freedom, of lib- 
erty, everywhere, and for all who have the human 
image, or » human form divine," more earnestly and 
more zealously than Charles Sumner. 

CHARLES SUl^INER THE INCORRUPTIBLE STATESMAN. 

Some small men, men of feeble intellects, have told 
us that Mr. Sumner was not a statesman at all ; that 
he originated nothing, but was merely an imitator of 
others, seizing upon their thoughts, and carrying out 
their ideas. One of these said of Sumner, " Of ori- 
gination, there is no speck in his reflections, or spark 
in his style. Nature did not intend aught intellect- 
ually pre-eminent in his constitution. He had no 
organic strength to strike out new paths in action or 
expression." 

This, it is believed, is not coiTect. He showed ori- 



S6 



MEMOIR OF CHARLES SUMXER. 



ginal power in the course he pursued through his whole 
pubHc career ; yea, even before he held any public 
office. It was a great thought, a very great idea, to 
assert, as he did in his first pubhc oration in Boston, 
that war ought to be abolished, and that nations 
should disarm. It was a great thought, an original 
one, wliich characterized his great speech, that slave- 
ry was sectional, not national. Other abolitionists 
had made war upon the Constitution first ; he upon 
slavery, and sustaining the Constitution. Who can 
say he was not both an originator and a statesman in 
starting into hfe this noble truth in our government ? 
It was the pivot upon which the whole question of 
slavery turned ; and he was the starter, the orimna- 
tor, of it. 

. Again : in the rebellion, many who espoused the 
side of the nation said, " The war is for the Union : 
slavery has nothing to do with it." This was echoed 
even, from high places. Mr. Sumner saw from the 
beginning that it was a war for slavery, and must 
be carried on afjainst slavery. In October, 1861, he 
said in a Republican State convention at Worcester, 
" It is often said that war will make an end of slave- 
ry ; but it is surer still, that the overthrow of slave- 
ry will make an end of the war; 

" If I am correct in this averment, which I believe 
beyond question, then do reason, justice, and policy 



MEMOIE OF CHARLES STIMNEE. 37 

unite, each and all, in declaring that the war must 
be brought to bear directly on the grand conspii'ator 
and omnipresent enemy. 

" Not to do so is to take upon ourselves all the 
weakness of slavery, while we leave to the rebels its 
boasted resources of mihtary strength. 

" Not to do so is to squander Hfe and treasure in 
a vain masquerade of battle, without practical result. 

"Not to do so is blindly to neglect the plainest 
dictates of economy, humanity, and common-sense; 
and, alas ! simply to let slip the dogs of war on a mad 
chase over the land, never to stop until spent with 
fatigue, or sated with slaughter. 

" Believe me, fellow-citizens, I know all imagined 
difficulties and unquestioned responsibilities. But, 
if you are in earnest, the difficulties will at once dis- 
appear; and the responsibihties are such as you 
will gladly bear. This is not the first time that a 
knot hard to untie was cut by the sword ; and we 
all know that danger flees before the brave man. 
Believe that you can, and you can. The will only 
is needed. Courage now is the highest prudence. 

"It is not necessary even, borrowing a familial 
phrase, to carry the war into Africa. It will be 
enough if we carry Africa into the war, in any form, 
any quantity, any way. The moment this is done, 
rebellion will begin its bad luck, and the Union be- 
come secure forever." * 



38 MEMOm OF CHAKLES SUMNEE. 

Certainly Mr. Sumner saw as a statesman; and 
well he lias been called a statesman by the most emi- 
nent men of the world. 

But I have said he was an incorruptible statesman. 
Amidst all the falls from the grace of the people who 
elevated them to office, when Congress was rfeeldng 
in corruption, when " even the elect " went astray, 
Charles Sumnerv stood unscathed, uncorrupted. He 
"knew of no corruption." No man ever offered 
him a bribe. No man ever dared to approach him 
with " Mobilier stock," or to offer him " back-pay." 
Towering, like Jove on liigh Olympus, above his fel- 
lows in this respect, his integrity unsullied, his char- 
acter without a spot, his noble life closed, like the 
setting sun, in splendor. One item more, and I have 
done. 

CHAHLES SUMlNrER THE ADMTEATIOISr OF THE WORLD. 

Never before has such homage been paid to any, 
save the two named on our first page. Witness him 
when abroad: the great and the good ever sought 
to do him honor. Witness him at home in Washing- 
ton : no one, even his most bitter enemy, ever 
doubted his sincerity, his love of principle, his high 
moral rectitude. Witness him as admired by four 
million colored people : while they revered " Massa 
Lincoln " as their emancipator, they honored " Massa 



MEMOIK OF CHAKLES SUMNEB. 



39 



Sumner " as tlie man who led tlie way to that eman- 
cipation. Witness, again, the mourning at his de- 
cease : it was like "the mourning of Hadadi'im- 
mon in the Valley of Megiddon; " it was universal. 
As he was the lover of his race, so he was the admi- 
ration Ci all men. 



THE YEEY CHIEFEST OF OUE STATESMEN. 

By gilbert HAVEN. 



Three martyrs to the cause of human libert}'- in 
America will stand forth a single cluster in the fu- 
ture ages, — John Brown, Abraham Lincoln, and 
Charles Sumner. Many others will circle about and 
beneath this tri-unity ; but none will shine in equal 
brightness. Lovejoy, the first victim to liberty of 
speech; Torrey, the first private emancipator, of 
whom Brown was the greatest and the last ; Bewley, 
the first preacher who dared denounce the sin of sla- 
very to an imbittered people, and whom a Texan 
mob sent hurriedly but not unpreparedly to heaven ; 
Randolph, the orator and leader, who arose from the 
ranks of the oppressed, and who fell by the hands of 
the Ku Klux assassins, all of whom were ministers of 
the gospel of Christ, — these are examples of mul- 
titudes who did not love their lives unto the death, 
out of a holy passion for human liberty. But among 



41 



42 THE VERY CFTIEFEST OP OUR STATESMEN. 

them all stand forth that chosen three. Others less 
honored in their death were not less honored in 
their lives. Some who remain to this present (may 
they long remain !) were even more important than 
any of these ; for the tide that bore Sumner and 
Lincoln to power would have carried other names 
thither, had they failed to have taken it at its flood, 
and thus failed, too, of being borne to prosperous for- 
tune. Even John Brown was but the volunteer be- 
fore the volunteers, — the independent warrior who 
fancied that his own right arm could smite down 
those strongholds, so weak and timorous and ill 
connected did he deem them to be. Had he not 
raised his hand, the irrepressible conflict would have 
moved forward to its divine consummation. 

But so it might be said of every issue between 
good and evil that has been fought out on this planet. 
The Revolution would have suceeded without either 
an Adams, a Franklin, a Jefferson, or a Washington. 
Europe would have been revolutionized without a 
Napoleon ; and without a Wellington he would have 
met with his Waterloo. Rome would have been 
Csesarized had no Julius appeared, and America dis- 
covered had Columbus never been born. The age 
is master of its men, and breeds the style of heroes 
its ideas require, as faithfully as the gardener devel- 
ops his needed grains and grasses. Still there is 



THE VEEY CHIEFEST OF OUR STATESMEN. 43 

always especial honor for those who represent the 
age. If the men are not above their times, no more 
are the times above their men. Each needs each : 
each fashions each. Among the millions of to-clay, 
not many Lincolns, not many Sumners, not many 
Browns, are called ; and of those that are called, 
fewer stiU are willing to be chosen. These elect 
souls must be willing in the day of God's power, or 
others who are willing will be effectually elected. 
He will raise up children out of stones if his chosen 
children refuse to obey him ; for the hour is struck, 
and the work must be done. 

Charles Sumner was found willing in this day of 
God. He proved to be one of those that are called 
and chosen and faithful. Rare is this list. Many 
in this highest duty are called, few chosen, — fewer, 
alas ! faithful. He was all. 

I was in Georgia when I opened the morning paper, 
and read across its telegraphic heading the huge and 
startling words, " Charles Sumner Dead." What a 
thrill shot through the heart of America when that 
flash of Ught and of darkness struck it ! That day 
was sunny and bland as a Northern June : yet dark- 
ness was over all the land. Not unlike was its out- 
ward sweetness to the day when the great soul of 
his fellow-servant went from a Virginia gallows to a 
thi-one in glory ; not unlike its inward blackness. 



44 THE VEEY CHIEFEST OF OUR STATESMEN". 

" As when, beueath the street's familiar jar, 
An earthquake's alien omen rumbles far, 

Men listen and forbode ; I hung my head, 
And strove the present to recall, 
As if the blow that stunned were yet to fall." 

As I rode southward, I paused at a station on tlie 
edse of Alabama. Friends and brothers whom I 
knew, hitely shxves, whom those martyrs had liber- 
ated, gathered about the depot. I told them the news. 
"Charles Sumner dead!" they incredulously cry: 
" it cannot be. Who shall break the last of the fetters 
of slavery, that still hang heavy upon our limbs, and 
heavier on our souls ? Alas ! he whom we thought 
would give us complete deliverance, is gone." 

In the State of Alabama, at nightfall, I found like 
mournful groups. The next day, at its capital, 
arrangements were being made for a public funeral 
at the State House, in which men of every degree 
and shade were to meet and lament together. The 
beginning of the flood that has since deluged all 
that section alone prevented this public lamentation. 

In the capital of North Carohna, I saw a hall 
draped, and heard voices of song and speech bewail- 
ing the noble dead. In Richmond a Hke voice was 
heard of lamentation and weeping ; while over the 
North and East and West went a refrain of corre- 
sponding sorrow. 



THE VERY CHIEFEST OF OUR STATESMEN. 45 

Wliy this sound of weeping, — this cry of the peo- 
ple ? Mr. Sumner was a man by training and feel- 
ing apart from the people. His instincts, education, 
and early habits made him " caviare to the general." 
He was still more averse to social affinity with the 
humbler classes, and peculiarly so with the most 
degraded. Lincoln was of them, and never in his 
highest exaltations felt himself above them. Brown 
was to their manner born. But Sumner, delicately 
fashioned in his sensibilities, nurturing them by 
most delicate training at home and abroad, — how is 
it that his death brings tears into lowhest eyes, and 
eulogies without number in pulpits and on platforms 
occupied by the proscribed and detested of our peo- 
ple ? Lincoln had not so many eulogies from this 
class, nor had any other of our public men. Seward 
died without a tear from their eyes ; and Chase 
disappeared, friend and lover of theirs as each of 
these great men were, without awakening equally 
responsive laments. 

Why is it that Sumner creates such emotion ? 

In the answer to this question lies the answer to 
his whole life-work. 

Many have written it : more will. But all must 
trace the river of his fame to the fountain-head of 
principle, — principle over-riding personal dislike 
and affinities ; principle turning a Uterary life, a 



46 THE VERY CHIEFEST OF OUR STATESM^JN". 

hauglity life, a recluse life, into one of open, arduous, 
humble, and most devoted service to his fellow-men. 

Trace the workings of that princii)le, and you 
draw the life of Charles Sumner. The most accu- 
rate delineation of those workings will give the most 
accurate portrait. The limitations of that j)rinciple 
will show where other elements, more primal, per- 
haps, in his education, if not in his nature, came 
into play, and where he is another man than the 
Sumner of the great past and the greater future. 

Yv^hat was that principle ? It was the equality 
of all men before the law. Note the phi'aseology ; 
for it is his own, and it is the key to his own char- 
acter and career. Not the absolute and uncondi- 
tioned equality of all men. Jefferson had made that 
announcement ; and the Continental Congress had 
made it their own in accepting his declaration as 
theirs. The French democrats asserted this as their 
chief article of faith. It is the highest ideal of man. 
But Sumner's ideal was always within the realm of 
his real. He was not of imagination aU compact, 
either in principle or policy. He was pre-eminently 
practical. His tastes, sympathies, plans, and pur- 
poses were all realistic. His gifts and graces of 
rhetoric and oratory were equally restricted. His 
pen was not winged with native fancy, and could 
not sweep all skies as if at home only there. It was 
an ostrich plume, — 



THE VERY CHIEFEST OF OUR STATESMEN". 47 
"A ground eagle for swift flying," — 

not a condor-wing floating by necessity of nature 
above the highest Andes. The whole mouhl and 
force of his soul were thus limited. Had it not been 
inflamed with principle, it would have been as cold 
and classic and dead as a Phidian Jove. 

But that idea, and the duty into which* it grew, 
though it had limitation, was mighty, nay, all mighty 
within its own conditions of being. It made him a 
pohtical, a constitutional, a national abolitionist. 
Other warriors on this field took humanity for their 
inspiration. The words "before the law" would not 
have limited their theme, — " the equality of all men." 
Jefferson would have felt that amendment as a 
wound ; so would Phillips and Garrison ; so would 
John Brown ; so would many a clerical abolitionist 
whose Christ is his creed. But it gave power to 
Sumner. He massed his principles, that he might 
make them the more surely and swiftly victorious. 
He had one point at which to strike, — a point 
visible to every eye^ a point accessible to human 
statute, and therefore entirely within the realm of 
political debate and duty. 

As he and his once elder but now younger co- 
laborer thus differed in idea, they also differed in 
the evolution thereof. Phillips, believing in man as 



48 THE VEEY CHIEFEST OF OUR STATESMEN. 

man, cared notliing for constitutional restrictions or 
national limitations or political combinations. " A 
man's a man," was liis war-cry. " What right has a 
constitution to proscribe him ? If that will not sur- 
render, let it die ; for man alone is immortal." This 
clothed his arm with thunder, and gave his voice the 
authority of a prophet of God, which is the authority 
of God himself. This made the nation shudder and 
shriek at his words, wonderful though they were for 
Apollo swiftness and beauty. 

The silver bow twanged death to beast and man 
in the Argive camp, and was none the less terrible be- 
cause it was enchantingly lovely. So this Apollo of 
abolitionism shot death to constitutions, churches, 
and laws, from liis mellifluous tongue and brain, as 
he simply put them to the test of humanity. He 
could never hold office any more than Apollo could 
become Agamemnon. His duty was to preach : 
others, to reduce that preaching within the realm 
of immediate political and social and ecclesiastical 
duty. That realm felt his presence, resisted, and 
submitted. Political parties sprang up to put this 
truth into national shape and force. Ecclesiastical 
parties arose to perfect the Church after this pattern 
shown this seer in the mount of God. And social 
influences are slowly but surely working out the 
same perfection, under the same stimulus. 




The late Residence of CHARLES SUMNER, Washington, D. C 



THE VERY CIUEFEST OF OUR STATESMEN. 49 

It was long before Sumner's principle got posses- 
sion of him. He grows up seemingly unconscious of 
it. He goes through the Latin School and college, 
without showing any trace of this idea. He loves 
debates, and gets up mock speeches, and reads litera- 
tui-e, and goes so far in his idolatry of Shakspeare as 
to blasphemously put on his works the name given 
properly to only one volume, — The Book. He is a 
literary youth, and that only. He is proud, scholas- 
tic, ambitious of hterary distinction. He goes into 
professional studies, and into Eui-opean society, with- 
out a thought seemingly of his ultimate work and 
fame. Doubtless, had it then been told liim that he 
would be identified with the black and enslaved pop- 
ulation of the country, he would have said, as he after- 
wards so haughtily responded to a taunt of the senator 
from South Carolina, as to whether or no he would 
execute the Fugitive-Slave Bill, " Is thy servant a 
dog, that he should do this thing ? " Yet there was 
that in his early life, which suggested this possi- 
biUty. When a youth just rising twenty, he gave 
an address before a colored association of Boston, 
himself dressed in the highest fashion of that day ; 
and, when asked why he put such extra care into his 
apparel, he rephed, " If I would teach them to re- 
spect themselves, I must myself respect them." 

So, whatever acts and words his central official 



50 THE VERY CHIEFEST OF OUR STATESMEN. 

idea required were cheerfully granted. Though as 
a law-maker he had only one maxim, and that in- 
volved the wholeness of his professional being ; yet 
if this word required any social sacrifice, any social 
obloquy, the sacrifice was cheerfully made, the ob- 
loquy gladly encountered. 

To judge him aright one must first see how faith- 
ful he was to his central purpose ; and then see how 
faithfully he followed this purpose whithersoever it 
led him. 

That idea and purpose were, the making of all 
men everywhere in our nation the equal of all men. 
The first barrier that stood in the way of this civil 
equality was slavery. As long as that prevailed, 
there was no possibility of any equality. It was itself 
the very essence and soul of anti-equahty. It was the 
antipodes of every human right. Brotherhood was 
a term abhorrent to this institution. Humanity could 
never be mentioned in its presence. Man was no 
man where it held sway. Law was lawless under 
its edicts. Sumner saw and felt this terrible obsta- 
cle to his ideal truth. Why seek to ehminate war 
from the world, when the most violent of wars, that 
against every human right and against man himself, 
was waged effectually by a gigantic system in our 
own nation ? Until that is overthrown, no victory is 
possible on the lower plains of human brotheiliood 



THE VERY CHIEFEST OF OUR STATESMEN. 51 

and peace.* He girds himself to the encounter with 
this powerful organism. He strikes it where he feela 
that he can do it the most harm, and insure its 
speediest annihilation. He allows others to move 

* The state of our nation when Sumner appeared is described 
with great force in a sermon on his death, preached at Auburndale, 
Mass., by Rev. Dr. Daniel Steele, and published in Zion's Herald. 
This passage is a condensed but most feeble expression, as all 
expressions must be, of that horror of horrors : — 

" The darkest period of American history was not from 18G1 to 
1865, when the thunder-cloud of civil war overcast the skies, and 
filled our ears with its terrific thunders. No : that was the sunrise 
of our nation's day of glory. The noon of the long night preceding 
■was the year 1850. Then slavery was triumphant over this Repiib- 
lic. Millard Fillmore, who was buried last Thursday, had just 
signed the Fugitive-Slave Bill, which turned Massachusetts into a 
hunting-ground of -slaves, and commanded every citizen to be a 
slave-hunter, with penalties and prisons for obeying Jesus Christ 
by feeding the hungry and clothing the naked. The Territories had 
just been opened to slavery by law ; and the Dred Scott decision was 
just about to nationalize slavery, asserting that it had a right to 
exist everywhere in the Territories, not by virtue of local and State 
laws, but by the force of the Federal Constitution. The crime 
against Kansas was plotted by the repeal of the Missouri Com- 
promise, which stood in the way of slavery. The crack of the 
slaveholder's lash Avas heard in the national capital; and a Southern 
senator had boasted that he would call the roll of his slaves beneath 
the shadow of Bunker-Hill Monument. The Chi-istian pulpit 
through a large part of our land was silent : the muzzle of slavery 
had made the ministers of God's word like dumb dogs that could 
not bark ; in fact, many were defending the great crime as a divine 
institution, and were, in the words of Shakspeare, "blessing it with 
a text," while Christian men and saintly women were pining in 
jails for the crime of teacliijig i lijidreu to read the Holy Scrii)lures ; 



52 THE VERY CHIEFEST OF OUR STATESMEN. 

against it on general fields of philanthropic and 
Christian motives. He sets his battle in array 
against it on the field of constitutional and political 
and legal obligation. " Liberty under the Constitu- 

the Bible was a forbidden book in the cabins of four millions of souls, 
who, most of all, needed its light and comfort, its cheering promises, 
in this their night of gloom ; mothers saw their children sold, one 
by one, on the anctiou-block, and torn from their tearful embracts, 
to be thrust down to the nethermost hell of slavery, — the daughteis 
to supply the brothels of New Orleans and Mobile, or to endure the 
brutal lash and the more brutal lusts of a pitiless overseer on a 
cotton-plantation, with a peck of corn a week for their legal rations; 
and the sons to die in the rice-swamp, or to be torn by bloodhounds 
in the vain attempt to escape the degradation, the insults, the 
cruelty, the life-long agony and grinding tyranny, of oppression. 

" But why should I detail the horrors of that system which God 
in his lierce anger has blotted out forever in the blood of a thousand 
battle-lields? Why should 1 speak of iniquity framed into a law, 
wliich deliberately stripped human beings of their God-given rights, 
making them stand naked before their enemies, with no father, no 
mother, no brother, no sister, no wife, no husband, no chUd, no land, 
no house, no protector, no standing in court, no protection of law, no 
ballot, no property, no education, no Bible, no God, — nothing but a 
master? — a system under which no woman was a wife, but every 
woman a mother ; a system which for self-defence became a unit 
in our national councils, and exerted for seventy-five years a domi- 
nant control over this nation ; which terrified the pulpit, and sub- 
sidized the press, and drove free speech from the Eepviblic ; which 
corrupted the Church, making us all silent, or speak with velvet- 
tongued euphemisms of the Abrahamie, the patriarchal, the domes- 
tic institution, instead of calling it oppression, tyi-anny, and slavery. 
The Bible Society, in deference to the cruel commands of slave 
laws, without even a protest, cravenly charged the Bible distributor 
to pass by the humble cabin of the slave hungering for the word 



THE VERY CHIBFEST OF OUR STATESMEN. 53 

tion" is his demand, before lie enters the senate- 
house. 

" Equality before the law," he rings out deep and 
melodious in his first official speech. It is seemingly 
on a subject having no affinity with this cause. It 
is in a welcome to Kossuth that he injects this 
phrase. He commends the Hungarian leader for his 
faithfulness to the equality of all men before the 
law. Every eye and ear in that chamber were watch- 
ing the first words of this invader. They looked for 
the flashing of his sword at the opening of his lips. 
He leads them far away from the main question. He 
discourses of a European's wrongs and rights. He 
makes them listen to another's woes than those of 
their own fellow-countrymen in chains; when lo, 

of life ; and the American Tract Society meanly garbled the free 
utterances of English Christians, and suppressed their expressions 
of righteous indignation against the 'sum of all villanies,' cutting 
out of the charming biography of a Scotch maiden the fact that she 
daily prayed in secret for the American slave, and expurgating 
from that beautiful hymn of gratitude, sung by English children, 
this little verse of thanksgiving to God : — 

' I was not bom a little slave, 

To labor m the siui, — 
To wish I were but in my grave, 

And all my labor doue.' 

So low down on their knees did the great religif)us organizations 
get, to do homage to the Moloch to whom they permitted slavery to 
sacrifice their children." 
5* 



54 THE VERY CHIEFEST OF OUR STATESMEN". 

as they are encliained by the subtle melody of his 
voice and of his sentences, there drops carelessly out 
this key-note of his life drama. " Carelessly ? " Far 
from it. It is the carelessness of the great composer, 
who puts the bars and notes of the theme of his elab- 
orate composition into the seemingly confused con- 
flict of his overture. That line of melody is the soul 
of the whole. So Sumner's single phrase, hidden 
away in this senatorial overture, was the statement 
of his life-work up to that time, and on from that 
time to its yet uncompleted consummation. 

Soon he proceeds steadily, and before every eye, 
to assail the first obstruction to this principle, — the 
legal ownership of men. He studies our Constitu- 
tion to see if in word or letter it expressly recognizes 
this evil. He finds its founders wonderfully reticent. 
Though they were all, when the Declaration of In- 
dependence was proclaimed, involved in this system ; 
though Massachusetts was then as guilty as Virginia, 
and Hancock who led the signatures so haughtily, as 
well as Jefferson who wrote the decree, were alike 
slaveholders; though even when the Constitution 
was adopted there was only one free State on the 
continent, and every member of that convention, 
from New York and New Jersey and Pennsylvania, 
from New England also, except those from Massachu- 
setts, was either personally or representatively a slave- 



THE VERY CHIEFEST OP OUB STATESMEN". 55 

holder ; and though the Southern delegates were 
actively and largely thus : still the word " slave" was 
omitted from the grave document they were prepar- 
ing, — the foundation of many generations. Wash- 
ington would not allow its entrance there. Jefferson 
abhorred the system, while he accepted it. Madison 
studiously shunned the anti-human word. Hamilton 
had no place in his patrician system for this super- 
feudalism. Franklin would not allow its accursed 
form to cross the constitutional threshold : Roger 
Sherman kept Connecticut from being an ally to 
this enemy of man.* Even South Carolina's sons 
were content with certain privileges which they 
might construe to the support of the system, and did 
not wish the dread word itself to find entrance 
there. Madison declared that he thought " it wrong 
to admit into the Constitution the idea that there 
could he property in man." Others were equally 
careful to avoid verbal complicity with the evil. 
Thus the Constitution escaped hteral contamina- 
tion. "It was not so nominated in the bond." 
But it had two clauses which had been interpreted 
from the beginning as recognizing it, and which 
were probably intended, in part at least, to recog- 
nize it, — that of the basis of representation, and 

* He declared that he was " opposed to a tax on slaves imported, 
because it implied tliat they were property." 



56 THE VEEY CHIEFEST OF OUR S TATES3VIEN. 

that of restoring fugitives from labor ; and these, by 
then- early and continued application in this direc- 
tion, had led the public mind to believe that the 
system itself was formally and verbally indorsed in 
the Constitution. 

The public conscience was perplexed in the ex- 
treme. One powerful body of reformers charged the 
Constitution with being directly guilty. They de- 
clared it an agreement with death, and a covenant 
with hell. They demanded abohtion action over the 
Constitution. Another approved of action under 
the Constitution, but still felt that the national 
Word was against them. They could not separate 
between the letter and the spirit. Many believed 
that the Fugitive-Slave Bill was constitutional, while 
they believed it wrong. 

It was Sumner's great privilege and opportunity 
to rectify the reading of the Constitution. More 
than Webster should he be called the Defender of 
the Constitution ; for he defended its letter against 
the rulings and legislation that had debased it. His 
first oration gave a new reading to this charter. He 
showed how studiously its authors avoided the word 
of shame ; how that every article could be faithfully 
kept, and the national honor be unimpeached. He 
proved that freedom was national, and slavery sec- 
tional. He proved that it was the sjpirit that now 



THE VEKY CHIEFEST OF OUR STATESMEN. 57 

possessed the Constitution which killed ; its letter 
gave life. 

He thus also spiked the chief gun of the opposi- 
tion in the North. They had steadily maintained 
that slavery was constitutional. They had given 
Calhoun and company all their arsenal, by giving 
them this declaration. Out of this every weapon 
could be forged that was being used for the destruc- 
tion of the nation. For if slavery was constitu- 
tional, then was it national : if national, then univer- 
sal. * Any limitations imposed upon that universality 
were unconstitutional. Forbidding the carrying of 
this constitutional merchandise anywhere in the 
nation was itself unconstitutional: forbidding the 
foreign traffic was equally at variance with its ruling 
principles, even if found in the charter itself. The 
principal governs the subordinates ; and the Consti- 
tution should be amended in harmony with its 
central idea, if slavery is its corner-stone, and not 
liberty. 

The decrees of the Supreme Court were made 
agreeable to this Calhoun dogma. The slave, carried 
into a free State and returning, gained thereby no 
rights as a freeman. The same court, it was said, 
had also prepared a decree declaring it to be uncon- 
stitutional to forbid slavery in the Territories, and 
opening every Northern port to its traffic. Only the 



58 THE VERY CTTIBFEST OP OUR STATESMEN". 

election of Abraham Lincoln, and the outbreak of 
the rel)ellion, prevented this perfection of infamy. 

The public mind and conscience needed illumina- 
tion on this subject. The children did not like to 
smite their fathers. They wished to believe that 
slavery was as unpopular in the Revolutionary era 
as in their own. They forgot that 

" The thoughts of man are widened with the process of the suns ; " 

that Christianity is like leaven, constantly working 
upon a still unassimilated mass, and constantly, 
therefore, making the sons, if faithful in using it, 
better than the fathers. "I am wiser than the 
ancients," is as true to-day as when first written, if 
there is also added the reason for this superior wis- 
dom, " for Thy words are ever with me," enlarging 
and exalting oiu' minds and our ways. 

If, then, the Constitution had been not only 
defective, but openly and avowedly guilty, the duty 
of to-day would have been none the less clear. The 
British Constitution has defended every sort of 
tyranny. Precedent does not control absolutely 
those who abide by that unlettered utterance. It is 
the will of to-day which they seek to embody in 
constitutional form. 

But we had been constitutionally paralyzed. 
We did not dare to touch it, for fear it would all go 



1 



THE VERY CHIEFEST OF OUR STATESMEN. 59 

to pieces. It was a Prince Rupert's Drop : broken 
anywhere, it was broken everywhere. It became 
a fetich ; it became a fetter, — at once an idol and 
a chain. 

It is Sumner's first and not least glory that he 
saved us the fathers and the Constitution. He 
begins his senatorial career with a defence of the 
Constitution and the fathers. His enemies expected 
him to assail that venerable document. They felt 
sure that he would fall, as a legislator, by cutting 
from under his feet the only platform on which he 
could stand as a national legislator. They never 
dreamed that he was going to snatch this very plat- 
form from beneath their feet, and make them, in all 
their pleas against Congressional action for liberty, 
and all their efforts to cast the nation into the chains 
of slavery-propagandism, the violators of the Con- 
stitution itself. 

Yet this masterly stroke of policy was his. He 
astonished friend and foe by that watchword and 
that argument. He proved that his " were the 
fathers ; " that the compact was inspired with Uberty 
and the rights of man ; that the Declaration was the 
father of the Constitution ; that slavery was the 
stone rejected of the builders, and was not, as Calhoun 
had said, the corner-stone of the Republic; that 
every edict favorable to slavery was unconstitutional, 



00 THE VERY CHIEFEST OF OUR STATESMEN". 

and every edict opposed to it was constitutional ; 
that the proviso forbidding its presence in the Terri- 
tories was national, and the Fugitive-Slave Bill was 
anti-national. He was always careful to call it the 
Fugitive-Slave Bill^ never recognizing it as a statute, 
a law ; only an attempt to become a law. 

This oration showed at once his genius as a states- 
man, no less than his skill as a reformer. He had 
the nov Vtw, — the place where he could stand and 
move the world. And there he did stand ; and 
thence he did move the world. He made abolition- 
ists constitutionalists. He snatched that magic 
sword Excalibar from the hands of the enemies of 
man and of the hour, and waved it magnificently, — 

" Like a streamer of the northern morn," 

for man and for the hour. 

Henceforward he was the real head of the anti- 
slavery movement within the national lines. Mr. 
Seward, astute and forcible ; Mr. Chase, more radi- 
cal than Seward, and none the less persistent ; Mr. 
Wilson, a far better organizer of men into parties, 
a moulder of ideas into votes ; Mr. Greeley the 
mighty editor, — all these, and all Others, as consti- 
tutional abolitionists, saw the singleness of eye and 
aim, and felt the force of this leader. He absorbed 
into himself the whole political movement. He die- 



THE VERY CHIEFEST OF OUR STATESMEN. 61 

tatcd terms to his allies, and drew upon liimself the 
madness of the enemies of liberty. He was first in 
the great fight against the repeal of the Missouri 
Compromise ; and, in his second grand oration, " The 
Crime against Kansas," brought upon his head the 
murderous blows of slavery's assassin. With a true 
instinct, that power smote him down. He had 
changed to all the nation the aspect of the Consti- 
tution ; had made it an object of love, not fear ; 
had marshalled the forces of freedom within the 
national charter and under the national flag ; and 
now these masters see that he is stirring up the 
Northern masses to fight for liberty under the Con- 
stitution. Wisely, as men count wisdom, was he 
stricken down. His death destroys his idea. If they 
slay him the inheritance is theirs. Vain hope ! 

" If the red slayer thinks he slays, 
Or if the slain thinks he is slain, 
They know not well the subtle ways 
I keep and pass and txarn again." 

Sumner knew well that he was not slain. He was 
perfectly aware that his battle was the Lord's, and 
that whatsoever might happen to him should only tend 
to the furtherance of the gospel he was anointed to 
proclaim and to establish in all this earth. 

Henceforth he was placed among the martyrs. 



62 THE VERY CHIEFEST OF OUR STATESMEN". 

Hencefortli there was a different feeling toward liim 
than toward any otlier of our statesmen. He had 
suffered unto blood, striving against sin. He bore 
in his body the marks of the Lord Jesus. He there- 
fore had claims to speak, as one from the dead. His 
speech was never changed in purpose or in tone. It 
still had no imprecations for his murderers, as they 
meant to be and were adjudged to be, but abundant 
arraignment and condemnation of the iniquity that 
had made them its slaves, and that was fast plunging 
the nation into a dawnless night. He perhaps 
assumed from his partial recovery a more domineering 
attitude towards the friends of freedom than he had 
before exhibited. His vision had grown clearer 
under that long and terrible prostration ; and he was 
not willing to abate one jot or tittle in the immedi- 
ate and utter extermination of the national horror. 
He was keen to detect every compromising tendency, 
and quick to rebuke it. He was instant in season, 
out of season, rebuking, reproving, pressing duty, 
and repressing delay. He struck the hydra wherever 
he lifted up his head, and whatever head he lifted up. 
Nay, he struck his huge bulk yet undeveloped into 
bristling crests ; knowing that only in this destruc- 
tion could there be permanent peace under liberty. 

This far-sighted and bold-speaking and strong- 
planning pohcy led him often to separate from less 



THE VERY CHIEFEST OF OUR STATESMEN. 63 

daring allies. He resisted any tendency to compro- 
mise, any delay in energetic action. He was the 
pioneer blazing the pathway through untraversed 
forests to on-marching civilization. He worried his 
party by his perpetual demands. Lincoln irked his 
presence, and Seward fretted under his dictation ; 
while lesser powers openly and sneeringly reyolted, 
or sought to revolt, from his control. Senators, East 
and West, declined to accept his terms, and tried to 
pass measures without his approval, or refused to 
pass those that met his approval. Thus the abolish- 
ment of slavery in the district was voted down 
by a Republican Senate ; new States in the far 
West were admitted with the word " white " in their 
Constitution ; the Fugitive-Slave Law they would not 
repeal ; even compromises were offered the rebel 
slave-power, to the extent of a constitutional agree- 
ment not to touch slavery in the States, or south of 
the parallel of thirty-six thirty. 

Probably this greatest of statesmen was never 
more unpopular with his party than when that party 
assumed the government. They feared his stern 
faithfulness to the principles which had placed them 
in power. They sought conciliation, not abolition. 
They believed less stringent words would abate the 
violence of the tempest, and that time would give 
them a bloodless victory. 



64 THE VERY CHIEPEST OP OUR STATESMEN. 

Over against them stood this half-martyred repre- 
sentative of a great State, and demanded not war 
but justice. Detesting war as Horace's mothers 
detested it (" hella matrihis detestata''}, he yet more 
detested slavery. He would not trust it, no, not for 
an hour. It had outlawed itself : let it never return 
unto power. Its supporters may come back as soon 
as they please : he has no word of harshness for 
them; he is never even tempted to rebuke them. 
But they must come unshorn of this power: that 
shall never re-instate itself again in the American 
Republic if he can prevent it. 

/ This pertinacity made him a perplexing ally even 
to the most advanced of his associates. An incident 
is narrated in illustration of this, by a living witness. 
The Sunday after the fall of Lincoln Mr. Stanton 
called several leaders to his office, to consult on a 
proclamation or paper which he wished to have ac- 
cepted. He read his important document carefully ; 
but he was heard, if possible, more carefully. 
" Stop ! " suddenly broke in the deep, strong voice 
of Sumner. " Wait tiU I have finished reading the 
whole of it." — " Stop ! " repeated the senator. Again 
Stanton begged to go on: again the stentorian 
" Stop ! " blocked his path. It was a struggle 
between two strong wills : but the stronger prevailed ; 
and the reading was stopped until the point there 



THE VERY CHIEFEST OF OUR STATESMEN. 65 

raised had been faithfully considered, and probably 
until the whole scheme went to pieces on that rock. -^ 

Thus often he stopped the wheels of legislation 
when they were rolling carelessly or purposely on to 
wrong and to ruin. One favorite form of arresting at- 
tention and securing debate was to tack the undesh'ed 
dogma to some most desired bill. Thus he compelled 
both discussion and a vote. He believed in discussion. 
With Milton he welcomed the winds of controversy. 
He cried out with the prophet, " What is the chaff 
to the wheat? saith the Lord." He had no hesi- 
tation in making legislation hesitate, if so be he 
could thereby advance Hberty. " Blow, winds, and 
crack your cheeks ! " he would cry, " if so be you 
winnow this crop to a golden grain of solid worth." 

When he entered Congress the great debaters of 
the last generation were leaving it. Calhoun had 
already gone ; Clay and Webster were disappearing. 
Benton, the sturdy, still stood square on his feet ; 
Cass, 'Marcy, Douglas, Buchanan, Jefferson Davis, 
Mason, and Hunter, men of towering influence, 
strode before him. A few greater men, but far less 
famous then, were at his side ; of whom Hale and 
Seward and Chase were chief. The previous and 
current debates were on low and trivial themes. 
Finance and tariff — the two lowest of national 
theses, and always prominent in the lull of more 

6* 



66 THE VERY CHIEFEST OF OUR STATESMEN. 

important conflicts — busied the brains and tongues 
of these stalwart men. All united in despising and 
rejecting the principle of liberty, equality, and fra- 
ternity, which had been made by Jefferson the 
corner-stone of the American Constitution. 

Here his ringing oratory found ample field for 
novel and detested debate. He made them discuss 
slavery. He knew it could not bear the light. The 
more it strove to defend itself, the more defenceless 
it became. Silence was its only safety ; and silence 
was a confession of its guilt, and therefore of its 
doom. He drew the infuriate auditors, by this deter- 
mination to debate, from murderous purposes to 
solemn thinking. And when they had gone, and 
new men had come, brought there by his own genius 
inspiring the land, he was equally faithful in illumi- 
nating their understandings and strengthening their 
wills by his " large discourse of reason.' ' Thus he 
made all foes his servants. Slowly but surely they 
acceded to his plans. He kept the State from reel- 
ing into the slough of submission, in the changing 
from the old to the new. He moved it on the path 
predestined of liberty. Lincoln heard and heeded : 
so did his subordinates. Sumner was their master 
in spite of themselves. 

His steadfast devotion to his two central ideas, 
abolition under the Constitution, and equality before 



THE VEEY CHIEFEST OF OUR STATESMEN. 67 

the law, wrought at once increasing pertinacity and 
increasing breadth. The first made him incessant to 
see and to extirpate every possible head of the adver- 
sary of freedom. He did not rest on his general 
announcement: he made it everywhere effective. 
Because the Constitution meant liberty, it was none 
the less necessary to revise the legislation under it, 
that that might say liberty. Hence he demanded the 
extirpation of slavery in the District of Columbia, 
the forbidding of it in the Territories, the repeal of 
the unconstitutional Fugitive-Slave Act, the declara- 
tion of emancipation under the war powers of the 
government. Hence, too, he demanded protection 
against any possible restoration of slavery to power, 
by such constitutional amendments, with power 
on the part of Congress to enact the necessary 
legislation to enforce the same, as would forever 
prevent that hydra from re-growmg his beheaded 
head. 

How wise that provision was may be seen in the 
light of late events, when most of the States in re- 
bellion have lapsed into the power of those who had 
formerly ruled them, and when even a governor of 
such a State dares to say, that, under these constitu- 
tional amendments, peonage or feudalism — that is, a 
control of the laborer and his labor — can be intro- 
duced. Had it not been for these protections, slavery 



68 THE VERY CHIEFEST OF OUR STATESMEN. 

would have re-appeared in more than half of those 
States to-day. 

He was not only a leader in these constitutional 
provisions and protections ; he was none the less the 
guide of Congress and of the nation in securing 
larger and larger equality before the law unto all 
the people. He was the first to call for arming the 
^gro. Here and there a courageous co-worker had 
put the servant to the gun. Gen. Fremont and 
Gen. Butler had initiated, by actual experiment, this 
reform. But they acted without authority, and so 
without power. Sumner set to work to secure the 
arming of the slave by the government. When he 
first demanded this step at the Worcester State Re- 
publican Convention, he was met by indignant and 
terrified remonstrance from press and people. Every 
Boston journal except " The Traveller " struck 
madly at him. The Connecticut Valley leader of 
the press was alike wrathful. The classic " Adver- 
tiser " assailed the veracity of his quotation from 
Plutarch to prove that Marius in his extremity armed 
the slave to save Rome. I had the pleasure of ex- 
amining the authorities, and preparing a defence of 
Mr. Sumner's position from the original. It was 
carried to the office of " The Advertiser." A vener- 
able gentleman took the paper, and promised to ex- 
amine it. A call was made the next day to see what 



THE VERY CHIEFEST OF OUR STATESMEN. 69 

disposition was made of it. The wliite-haired chief 
returned it, saying, "If I should publish that, I 
should have my building pulled down over my head 
before to-morrow morning." It was taken to " The 
Traveller," and immediately published without any 
such catastrophe attending. 

That Mr. Sumner .felt the criticisms of the press 
on his advanced positions, is evident from the fact 
that in his works he has gathered a large group of 
friendly and unfriendly words on this, as on the 
other novelties he demanded of liis party and his 
country. He has thus embalmed for history the 
currents of opinion, and shown that he was steadily 
opposed by a halting press, and steadily sujjported 
by a true and growing public sentiment. 

As he had led in demanding no concession, eman- 
cipation, and the arming of the negro, so he startled 
friend and foe by demanding his enfranchisement. 
Aptly does he put as a motto to his speech delivered 
under the auspices of the Young Men's Republican 
Union of New York, at Cooper Institute, Nov. 27, 
1861, this quotation : — 

" Come t(0 the common pulpits, and cry out, — 
Liberty, freedom, and enfranchiaement ! " 

This word " enfranchisement " found early lodge- 
ment in his mind and will. It, too, followed the 



70 THE VERY CHIEFEST OF OUR STATESMEN. 

arming, by a logical necessity ; and thoiigli tbe fram- 
ing of the amendment securing it was in the words 
of Senator Boutwell, then a memher of the House 
of Representatives, the initiation of it in Congress 
was with Charles Sumner. 

Many minor assaults on the same insidious and 
universal foe were made by him ; and from every 
nook and corner where it had taken refuge did he 
seek to expel it. Like a murky and mephitic atmos- 
phere, slavery had penetrated everywhere. Like 
the sun, Sumner drove his shafts of enactment upon 
its pestilential presence, and scattered their foulness 
forever with his beams. There were no passports 
granted, when he became senator, to men of color. 
He secured the first given after the infamous Dred 
Scott decree, from Mr. Seward, in favor of the son 
of Robert Morris, Esq. They could not testify in 
courts. He obtained remission of that sin. They 
were allowed to carry the mail through his help. 
They obtained patents through his intervention. 
He prevented the shutting up of their schools in 
North Carolina, as had been ordered by the mihtary 
governor. His own narrative of this event is 
characteristic. Having the fact laid before him, that 
such an order had been issued, he hurried with it to 
the President. Not finding him at the Executive 
Mansion, he hastened to the War Department. The 



THE VERY CHIEFEST OF OUR STATESMEN. 71 

President, a little worried, says nervously, " Do you 

take me for a school-committee man ? " " Not at 

all: I took you for the President of the United 
States," was the sudden and grand rei3ly, adding 
instantly, " I come with a case of wrong, in attend- 
ing to which, your predecessor George Washington, 
if alive, might add to his renown." He thus was 
present everywhere to detect a wrong done against 
Ms cardinal doctrine, " equality of all men before 
the law," and as potent as present to destroy the 
wrong detected. 

His last effort, now on its way to victory, over 

bloody corpses, perhaps, must it march to triumph, 
but it will march, — was in the direct line of his life 
idea. It was to complete the equality of all men 
before the law that he drew up his famous Civil- 
Pights Bill. This searched even to the dividing 
asunder of the joints and marrow, and became, like 
aU true words in debatable times, like the truest in 
divinest duties, a discerner of the thoughts and in- 
tents of the heart. It rooted up the last remains of 
this inhuman and unchristian bitterness. It swept 
the political house of all this abomination. It made 
a man a man over all the great Republic. It was tlie 
last and best of his deeds. Well might he bequeath 
it to his friend as his chief will and testament. 
" Take care of my Civil-Rights Bill ! " It was the 



72 THE VEBY CHIEFEST OF OUR STATESMEN. 

consummation and the crown of his life-long labors. 
It was the necessary confirmation of all preceding 
legislation. It was the working-out of the last stains 
of the man-eating horror of slavery. Its victory will 
be the ushering in, complete and glorious, of the latter 
day of the equality of all men under the law. 

Nay, not complete. One civil enactment is left 
out of even that famous bill. The right of marriage 
is prohibited stiU in some States between parties 
who have every other right from God and their own 
hearts, but whom a perverse spirit wickedly forbids. 
Many a State still makes impediment by unrighteous 
statute to the marriage of true souls. They still 
encourage licentiousness ; for the HHcit union is al- 
lowed and even approved, while lawful and Christian 
union is made impossible. Men rot to-day in Ten- 
nessee dungeons for obeying God and their own con- 
science. They are murdered in Georgia. There is 
still another Alp above those towering in that bill, 
which must be mounted before the last enemy to 
civil liberty is under our feet. 

Probably, to carry his bold measure of co-educa- 
tion, he kept back the bolder measure of co-marriage. 
That alone is left. This single, triangular apex of 
solid shining stone must complete the lofty monument 
of a symmetrical life. That will follow sooner or later, 
and Sumner's purpose and work be accomplished. 



THE VERY CHIEFEST OF OUR STATESMEN. 73 

We have not dwelt upon the shaded side of his 
character, nor upon other lustrous traits than those 
pertaiiiing to liis chief reputation. His scholarship, 
curious and felicitous, has been rivalled and equalled 
by many who are mere virtuosos of literature, — 
butterflies into which the bookworm sometimes 
changes. His delicate and trained taste, revealing 
itself in the appointments of his house and table, of 
his carriage and apparel, is not an essential element 
of his fame, any more than Lincoln's rudeness is a 
part of his real and immortal fibre. His judgment on 
other themes than that of human equality was never 
rated perhaps at its worth. His views of finance, 
of tariff, even of our foreign relations, into which 
last his scholarship led him, were not such as to 
usually forcibly and effectually impress the nation. 
Congress seldom listened to his arguments on these 
questions, while it never failed to listen to liis de- 
mands for human equality, and, though most re- 
luctantly, to obey. 

He had so often rightfully and successfully cried 
"Stop ! " to every scheme involving human wrongs, 
and " March ! " to every one involving human rights, 
that he perhaps unconsciously became almost himself 
the " Sir Oracle " that he had so sarcastically con- 
demned in another at the beginning of his senatorial 

career. He felt that his dictum was a divination. 
7 



74 THE VERY CHIEFEST OF OUR STATESMEN. 

So it was in one line : not so in every line. Thus 
he got entangled with his associates in questions of 
strife, and became at variance with the real leaders 
and workers of his ideas on his own chosen field. 
This variance grew partially also out of that love of 
scholarship, which made him ally himself with cul- 
ture sometimes in his later days, to a forgetfulness, 
in part, not of principle (that he never forgot), l)ut 
of the only men and means through which that prin- 
ciple could be worked out. 

' He, who defended Lincoln when his warm-blooded 
constikients deemed him too slow, had no word of 
defence for Grant, who nobly demanded in each in- 
augural the perfection of the rights he was himself 
most anxious to secure. The latter, with his keen 
military eye, has always seen farther than his prede- 
cessor, and from the beginning of his presidency 
until now has acted with admirable impartiality 
towards all his fellow-citizens. Yet Mr. Sumner 
never found place for a glowing tribute to this great- 
est of his disciples, who before he marched on 
Richmond compelled a reluctant administration to 
make his colored soldiers equal in pay to their 
white comrades ; who has put men of this hue in 
every honorable position ; who has never failed to 
accede to their claims and to defend them ; who has 
sustained governments all over the South, in the face 



THE VERY CHTEFEST OF OTJR STATESMEN. 75 

of the intensest calumny and hostility, by wliich 
alone their rights could have been respected. Should 
the orator have been silent in these critical moments, 
when all the principles with which he had identified 
himself were in peril, and the President was their 
faithful supporter? 

It has been said he was without ambition. That 
word in its very constitution has a wrong significance. 
It means " going about to solicit advancement." 
Such an ambition was undoubtedly far from Charles 
Sumner. Yet, that he was unconscious of his powers, 
and unwilling to take the place to which those 
powers would lift him, is not true of him, and is 
rarely, if ever, true of any man. That he keenly 
felt his removal from the chairmanship of the Com- 
mittee of Foreign Relations, shows that he was not 
unwilling to occupy that position. That he felt that 
he merited the headship of the administration, the 
chair of the Secretary of State, is not unknown : 
the head of that department in Congress for eight 
years, he might naturally expect to be its head when 
the master under whom he had been the chief 
servant vacated liis chair. Sumner was the proper 
successor of Seward. That he was passed over may 
have had something to do with the change of tone 
and action that was so early and so rapidly devel- 
oped. From the resuscitation of an obsolete law 



76 THE VERY CHIEFEST OF OUR STATESMEN. 

to prevent the President from making up his own 
cabinet, — revived not to be repealed, but to be 
restrengthened, — to the unpublished but not un- 
printed arraignment of the greatest promoter of his 
life idea and work it has ever had in official place, 
there was a seeming sense of injury, that may or may 
not be rightfully interpreted in the above suggestion, 
ertain it is, that his later years were clouded with 
this shadow, and that his arm lost somewhat of its 
strength through this paralysis of his party relations. 
Certain too it is, that his own bodily suiferings, the 
seeds and roots, unremoved and hardly latent, of the 
murderous attack upon him, revived under this un- 
happy conflict, and had no little to do with their final 
o'ermastery. Had all his relations to his co-leaders 
been pleasant, the irritation- of disease had been less 
severe, and its fatal work much longer delayed. 

But it should be said, to his honor, that none of 
these conflicts ever made him swerve a hair-breadth 
from hi^ principle, — equality of all before, the law. 
When called upon by the Texas delegation, who 
had been to Baltimore to nominate Mr. Greeley, 
and who were to a man the bitterest enemies of the 
principles of both these great leaders, he introduced 
them to liis friend Dr. Augustus, who was at his 
house, a gentleman of color : he asked them if they 
would adopt all the claims of his Civil-Rights Bill ; 



THE VERY CHIEFEST OF OUR STATESMEN. 77 

and they pledged themselves, so he affirmed, that 
they would do so. But all that part of the conver- 
sation was left out of the published report of the 
interview. He would have stood firm, whithersoever 
his new allies liad gone. He sought conciliation, but 
never abandoned equality. He led to the last all 
allies or foes, former or present, in advocating the 
most radical and righteous measures for the comple- 
tion of the work to which he had devoted his life. 

There is one other shadow on this sun. It did not 
openly accept its radiance from the only source 
whence such radiance comes. He was too faithful 
to his convictions not to honor like faithfulness in 
others. And like faithfulness will require this decla- 
ration. The word that he applied to Shakspeare at 
college, " The Book," seemed to imbue somewhat 
his whole career. He could not be expected to rise 
higher than his fountain ; and his childish, college, 
and churchly culture was not such as led him to 
recognize all the truth as it is in Jesus. Never were 
more lax notions current concerning Christ and 
Christianity* than in his youthful time and circle. 
It is surprising that he was not more completely 
moulded by them. The sturdy Puritan stock of his 
mother made her faith and life more Christian than 
her creed. The faith of her ancestors permeated 
unconsciously the unfaith of her own generation ; 
7* 



78 THE VERY CHIEFEST OF OUB STATESMEN. 

and heV son imbibed under her training the juices 
of the Mayflower creed, without its errors, and, alas ! 
without its formal truths. Especially the vital prin- 
ciples that Christianity infuses in all society, ran like 
suljtle lightnings tlu'ough all his spiritual frame. 
It was Christianity without Christ that he felt and 
preached and practised, — Christianity not of doc- 
trine but of life. It was Lowell's vision of Sir 
Launfal that he copied, not Tennyson's, nor, better 
yet, the original tradition which combined them 
both, — Christ's blood for man's redemption. The 
Holy Grail he sought and found was uplifted hu- 
manity. Had he joined to this a clearer vision of 
all the gospel in all its truths and principles, he had 
been a nobler, sweeter, happier man. As Wilber- 
force would he have been not alone in works, but 
in word also. 

But these flaws show the clay was human. Every 
sun must have its shadow, every kernel its husk, 
every soul its defect. " Non omnes omnia possumus.^^ 
His could not be a created soul, and be without some 
infirmity. Paul had his thorn; but that did not 
make him less, but more, a hero of God's. Sumner 
would not ask or approve of indiscriminate eulogy. 
He never employed it upon others. He never solicited 
it for himself. He was a man ; and nothing luiman, 
not even human weakness, was foreign from liim. He 



i 



THE VERY CHIEPEST OF OUR STATESMEN. 79 

did his life-work grandly : no one in all our political 
history more grandly, — hardly one as grandly. His 
creed blossomed into beauty above itself. The hard 
lines of Equality of all Men before the Law floresced 
into Love to all Men. If others could affirm that they 
loved the Lord their God with all their heart, he 
could humbly add, " And I my neighbor as myself." 
His request that his oppressed brothers should bear 
hun to his grave, — a request strangely overlooked ; 
his familiar admission of those outcast brethren to his 
companionship, even often against the edge of his 
sharp and polished culture ; his readiness to listen to 
their every wrong, and his haste to avenge it ; his 
soft and gentle manner to these clients, however 
dignified and reserved to those in a higher social 
scale, — these were only indices of a grand soul grow- 
ing grander in the atmosphere of its own development. 
Not soon will his name fade. All over this land 
he is lamented as only his associate martyrs have 
been. All over it will he be honored even more 
than they; for the white and the colored confess 
alike his iinswerving integrity and his masterly 
ability. But yesterday on the Cumberland Moun- 
tains, I heard leaders of the old South, not the new, 
declare that Sumner at any rate was honest, how 
much of self and party may control the action of 
others. Every conscience approves his course, even 



80 THE VERY CHIEFEST OF OUR STATESMEN". 

if the lips condemn. " Ne'er shall his glory fade." 
The nation he did so much to save and exalt shall 
exalt him. The slave, rising to liberty, to emancipa- 
tion, to civil and social equality, shall ever lift before 
him this stainless name as the one through whom, 
above all others, these legal privileges were his. His 
brother of lighter hue shall equally praise him by 
whom he has himself been delivered from the sin and 
shame of slave-holding and caste-holding, and been 
led into the liberty of righteousness and brotherly 
love. The disinthralled South and the disinthral- 
ling North shall hold him in equal love and honor, 
by whom they Avill be blessed to many generations. 

His clear name will shine beside the brightest in 
the world's annals ; and from it many a youth in 
coming time will draw inspiration to defend the 
right against any forces, however strong in social and 
civil p.osition, and however weak in every thing ex- 
cept its OAvn righteousness. Happily does the motto 
to his work discern that future. " Another age will 
come, more worthy than ours, in which, hatred 
being destroyed, virtue shall triumph. Desire that 
with me, reader, and farewell." * That age will find 
its youth bending over his munificent pages, and 

* Veniat fortasse aliud tempus, dignius nostro, quo, dehellatis 
odiis, Veritas triuinpliabit. Hoc meuum opta, lector, et vale. — 
Leibnitz. 



THE VERY CHIEFEST OF OUR STATESMEN. 81 

from liis urn drinking influence. The kindred re- 
forms of prohibition, and universal human (not as 
now semi-human) suffrage, and universal education, 
and peace, and universal brotherhood, and others 
hardly yet discerned, will gather force from his stal- 
wart devotion to his grand idea and purpose. May 
his career lead all hearts to the complete fulfilment, 
in themselves and in society, of all that is involved 
in that fruitful truth ! May America, in her reno- 
vated and interblended brotherhood of man, be herself 
his monument ! — not a cold statue of stately marble, 
but a vital organism, a State, a nation, a continent, 
whose every pulse shall beat responsive to his life, 
whose every form shall body forth liis spirit. Thus 
will mankind be brought nearer to the divine ideal, 
and the purposes of God receive larger impulse from 
his heroic career. Thus, too, his own defect of faith 
will be supplied by the greater faith of those who 
shall trace him up to his real if unconscious fountain- 
head, — the Lord Christ ; and, as the heathen sibyls 
ignorantly prefigured the Saviour, so shall he point 
to Him the sole source and centre of all human 
regeneration. 

In that light may all his admirers, and all his ob- 
jectors also, work out his principles to their vast 
and varied and complete and everlasting consumma- 
tion ! His work is yet far from being accomplished. 



82 THE VERY CHTEFEST OP OUR STATESIMEN. 

The intense hate and prejudice of all the land may- 
prevent its early accomplishment. What seas of 
wrath and blood may be encountered before that 
happy coast is reached, God only knows. Over his 
grave, in the wintry twilight of a stormy day, they 
sang Luther's grand hymn, — 

" Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott." 

It is not too late yet to solemnly repeat the same ; 
for it teaches us what powers of evil still roar about 
us and at us, and who alone can be our Redemptor 
and their AboHsher. 

A mighty fortress is our God, — 

A bulwark never failing ; 
Our helper he amid the flood 

Of mortal ills prevailing. 
For still our ancient foe 
Doth seek to work us woe : 
His craft and power are great, 
And armed with cruel hate. 

On earth is not his equal. 

Did we in our own strength confide, 
Our striving would be losing ; 

Were not the right man on our side, — 
The man of God's own choosing. 

Dost ask who that may be ? 

phrist Jesus, it is he, 



THE VEEY CHIEFEST OF OUR STATESMEN. 83 

Lord Sabaoth his name, 
From age to age the same. 
And he must win the battle. 

The word above all earthly powers ; 

No thanks to them abideth : 
The Spirit and the gifts are ours 

Through him who with us sideth. 
Let goods and kindred go, — 
This mortal life, also ; 
The body they may kill : 
God's truth abideth still ; 

His kingdom is forever. 

Amen and amen ! In the strength of this heroic 
dirge commit we the name and fame of Charles 
Sumner to future generations. When in America 
there shall be no hardness of heart towards brethren, 
but each shall esteem the other better than liimself ; 
when the world shall be one in Christ Jesus, — then 
shall this very chiefest of the apostles of civil Chris- 
tianity glow in the State as Paul now does in the 
Church, — the man who did and dared for constitu- 
tional right and civil equality and fraternity more than 
they all ; who sought not, as did the apostle, to bring 
heaven to earth, but to lift earth to heaven. The 
counterpart of the apostolic honor and immortality, 
therefore, is his, and shall be his to all generations. 



I 

i 



ADDEESS or HON. N. P. BANKS 

TS THE 

SENATE OF MASSACHUSETTS, MAECH 13, 1874, 



The event that has come upon us, Mr. President, 
as other gentlemen have said, is "so unadvised, so 
sudden, so hke the lightning, which is here and gone 
ere one can say, ' It lightens,' " that it is impossible 
for us to collect our thoughts sufficiently to give a 
representation of even the general appreciation of the 
character of the great man that has left us. And 
besides, sir, as senators well know, most members of 
the Senate have been engaged in a more practical 
and important duty than that of presenting our opin- 
ions as to the services of the illustrious senator, — in 
making arrangements for the final honors that are to 
be paid him by the State, and the people of this Com- 
monwealth. Yet, nevertheless, sir, it is due to his 
memory, and still more to the State and ourselves, to 
sufi-Q-est some views of his services and character, 
however imperfectly they may be presented. Mr. 
Sumner was known, and had an established reputa- 
tion, before he was charged with the partial represen- 
tation of the people of Massachusetts in the Senate of 



86 ADDRESS OF HON. N. P. BANKS. 

the United States. In his own honored university at 
Cambridge, he was a marked man : he was the 
flower of the literary societies, and subsequently be- 
came the recipient of its highest classical honors. He 
had also been elevated to the honors of the law-pro- 
fessorship, as the successor of Judge Story, at a very 
early period of his life. His eloquent voice had re- 
called the virtues and the genius of some of the most 
brilliant men of the time, — scholars, artists, philan- 
thropists, and jurists. His name was celebrated in 
the capitals of Europe. He was, therefore, not un- 
known when he came to the service of the Com- 
monwealth. It was in this service, as one of the 
representatives of the Commonwealth, that his char- 
acter will be judged, and upon which his fame must 
hereafter rest. The office of senator of the United 
States was, in point of fact, the only public office he 
ever held. It is true, he had held a commission, at an 
early period of his life, as one of the minor ministerial 
officers of the Government of the United States ; but 
it was a position which was uncongenial, and unsuited 
to his capacity, and not at all in accordance with his 
inclination ; and, when an important change had been 
made in the legislation of the country, it became im- 
possible for him to discharge its duties. So, sir, the 
office of senator of the United States was, in truth, 
the only public office he ever held. How well, sir, 
he filled that high station, we all know. None of us 
can well state, in such terms as here occur to us, the 
full measure of his success ; but we can all compre- 
hend and appreciate the great events of his life, which 



ADDRESS OF HON. N. P. BANKS. 87 

in thejnselves convey to the world a proper estimate 
of bis capacity and character. His election occurred 
in April, 1851. A few months earlier the Congress 
of the United States had passed what was known as 
the compromise measures, designed to settle all ques- 
tions of difficulty between the North and South. M:'. 
Sumner was elected, and entered upon his term of 
service, as an opponent of this act. He stood, there- 
fore, among those with whom he was thus associated, 
as a representative of a distinct principle, in opposi- 
tion to the policy which the government had adopted. 
The administration party, with the honored and dis- 
tinguished ex-president of the United States, Mr. 
Fillmore, at its bead, whose memory we appropriately 
noticed the other da}^ ; who, but yesterday, sir, was 
waiting, in common with that of our own beloved 
senator, in different parts of the country, the last sad 
honors of their respective States, before the tomb 
should shut them from our sight forever, — Mr. Fill- 
more, and the great men associated with him, the 
majority of the two houses of Congress, had deter- 
mined that a policy of concession was necessary and 
just. It was the voice of the people. It would lead, 
as they supposed, to peace, and avoid the impending 
fratricidal strife. Against that policy Mr. Sumner 
appealed, as the representative of a different spmt. 
He conceded nothing. He demanded every thing 
essential to the liberty guaranteed by the Declaration 
of Independence. Undoubtedly the great majority 
of the people were against him, regarding liim as an 
enemy of peace ; but the result shows upon whom 



88 ADDRESS OF HON. N. P. BANKS. 

the gift of prophecy had descended. The parties foE 
wliom tliese concessions had been claimed and made 
by these illustrious, and, no doubt, patriotic men, were 
determined to be satisfied with nothing that did not 
recognize slavery as the law of the land ; and, this 
extreme demand being rejected, they seemed ready, 
and, indeed, determined, to destroy the government 
itself. And thus, sir, when this resolution on the 
part of the Southern States was. made, the whole 
country had to recognize the fact, that the illustrious 
senator of Massachusetts had stated the only correct 
principle of action for the General Government in its 
dealings with this slave-power. And it was there- 
fore conceded, on all sides, that concession and com- 
promise, as a basis of settlement, were impossible. 
Upon this historical fact his reputation stands, and 
must forever stand : it proclaims him as the fore- 
most man of his time. For though he had many 
able, patriotic, and eloquent coadjutors in defence of 
the principles of freedom, which ought to have been 
accepted as the landmark of the nation, it is well 
known to the honorable senators at this board, that, 
from the earnestness of his nature, the intensity of 
his feelings on this question, he indulged in such 
eloquent invocations in behalf of liberty, such appeals 
to the sense of national justice, such stinging rebukes 
and such scathing denunciations of his opponents, that 
many selected this young giant of Massachusetts 
as the man who was their enemy, and who must be 
overthrown if their cause was not to be destroyed. 
The deceased senator in this conflict stood almost 



ADDRESS OF HON. N. P. BANKS. 89 

alone. Older senators, who had been taught by ex- 
perience how far m opposition to the predominant party 
they could safely go, had followed a more prudent 
course. They had even counselled the Massachusetts 
senator that his sharp methods of controversy were 
impolitic, and perhaps unsafe. But he did not desist-. 
He returned denunciation for denunciation, and scorn 
for scorn. Like the angel of Milton, — Abdiel, who 
was found, among the faithless, faithful, — 

" From tamidst them forth he passed, 
Long way through hostile scorn, which he sustained 
Superior ; nor of violence feared aught ; 
And with retorted scorn his back he turned 
On those proud towers to swift destruction doomed." 

Thus Mr. Sumner, in the Senate of the United States, 
received for ten long years the scorn of those that 
opposed the principles of which he Avas the represen- 
tative ; and thus he turned his back upon them " with 
retorted scorn," till those great States suffered the 
destruction to which they had been doomed. In tliis 
manner, sir, he became a representative of his country, 
from his fidelity to its principles. He was entitled 
to the consideration and marked respect of the whole 
people, whether they had been his enemies or his 
friends. 

As an orator, he had in his time few equals, cer- 
tainly no superior. It is unnecessary for us to speak 
of him in comparison with the ancient orators. We 
know little about them, we never heard them, we 
know of them only by tradition ; and we know enough 

8* 



90 ADDRESS OF HON. N. P. BANKS. 

of tradition to doubt tliat all that is said in praise of 
tliem is or can be really true. But the early orators 
of our own country we must remember perfectly 
well ; and however much we esteem them, and ap- 
prove their efforts, we must remember that the same 
orations which were then delivered with studied 
2)hrase, and with modulated voice and pre-arranged 
action, would not suit the people of our day. It is 
even doubtfid that the orations which thirty or forty 
years since so entranced the people of the United 
States would be now appreciated as they were then. 
The world is too busy to listen to artistic and studied 
harangues ; but we want to come directly to the 
point at issue, and understand the reasons for and 
against them. And, measured in this way, Mr. Sum- 
ner had no superior. He was not only an orator, an 
instructive speaker upon all great subjects which he 
was called upon to discuss ; but he was a keen and 
able debater, which is a very, different thing. And, 
although debate involved those sharp thrusts and 
retorts which were unpleasant to him through the 
whole period of his life, yet, when necessary, he had 
as sliarp and bitter a tongue as an}^ man that he en- 
countered. I myself have heard a few words uttered 
by him in the senate of the United States, in the 
midst of the assaults that were made upon him, that 
seemed to impregnate and change the very atmos- 
phere of the hall in which he stood. Such was his 
character, such his power of language in debate. It 
has been said already, here and elsewhere, that he 
was cold and distant ; but this was not the charac- 



ADDEESS OF HON. N. P. BANKS. 91 

t§r of his heart or nature. The man who, in 
the service of the government, has to consider a 
hundred or a hundred and fifty different subjects 
in a day, must dismiss them promptly, decidedly, but 
with kindness. It is quite competent for a man to 
bow, and say Yes, to everybody, and give the impres- 
sion to the country far and wide that he is the man of 
feeling ; but he is not the true man. The true man 
is he who receives every thing that is presented to 
hiniy and speaks honestly and trutlifully upon each 
question ; and the deceased senator never dealt other- 
wise with living man or woman. When we con- 
sider or understand that he was lofty or cold, it is 
because men and women have seen him upon those 
practical matters of business where it was impossible 
for liim to delay, or waste his time. But at the foun- 
dation of his being, in the depth of his soul, all his 
warm and strong friends say there was a well of 
generous and heartfelt .sympathies. We can well 
believe that it was this generous and sympathetic 
nature which led him to support the great cause to 
Avhich he dedicated his life. My honored colleague 
of the County of Suffolk, my associate on the com- 
mittee, informed me that when, a few days ago, the 
resolutions of the State of Massachusetts, repealing, 
rescinding, and annulling the resolution of condemna- 
tion that had been passed against him, were presented 
to liim, he received them with equanimity ; that 
he spoke a few words of one or two gentlemen con- 
nected with the government, whom he knew, and 
then, overcome with emotion, wept as a child. That, 



92 ADDRESS OF HON. N. P. BANKS. 

sir, was tlie character of the senator when you had 
stripped from him this husk, this hide of a rhinoceros, 
that every public man must, more or less, put on to 
protect him from the assaults of friends as well- as 
enemies. There is another consideration more im- 
l^ortant in estimating the character of the senator 
than those which have been suggested. He Avas a 
j)oint of union ; not a point of union for partisan suc- 
cess, but a point of union for great combinations, and 
the success of great principles. The way in which 
he came to be a senator of the United States illustrates 
the truth. He didn't seek this office. When he was 
elected, after a contest involving nearly four months' 
time, he deemed it proper to recognize his election, 
by notifying the two houses of his acceptance ; and 
he then declared, that while he accepted the office 
to which he had been elected, and returned grateful 
thanks for the honor conferred upon him, he had 
never lifted his hand to obtain it. The young men 
of the Commonwealth met this young giant, as 
Frederika Bremer called him, on his return from 
Europe, where he had been honored by the friend- 
ship of its scholars and statesmen ; and observing his 
interest in the philanthropic questions of the day, 
following him with their eyes or in his footsteps as 
he passed through the streets, — a man of perfectly 
symmetrical form, and vigorous and manly beauty, 
and feeling that there was for him a destiny in con- 
nection with the future, they made him their repre- 
sentative. There were plenty of men in the same 
organization in which he moved, and with which he 



J 



ADDRESS OF HON. N. P. BANKS. 93 

acted, that would have been very glad of serving the 
State in that regard : but they hadn't the power of 
union ,- they had not those qualities that drew men 
to them. Thus Mr. Sumner became a senator of the 
United States, After a desperate struggle here in 
the State of Massachusetts, which occupied the two 
houses, to the exclusion of almost all other business, ^ 
for nearly four months, and which tested the sincerity 
and integrity of men beyond that of any other ques- 
tion that was ever presented to the legislature, two 
hundred or thi'ee hundred men stood up for or against 
him, openly or covertly, every day and every night, 
from early morning until midnight. It must have 
been beheved that there was something in his charac- 
ter to support, or something in his nature to oppose, 
that was important to themselves or to the country. 
Then came another opportunity when he could unite 
the people in a greater movement for the success of 
great principles. After some years' service, having 
spoken for the people of Massachusetts strongly and 
clearly, he was made the subject of a brutal and 
cowardly assault as he sat, pinioned as it were, at his 
desk, and unable to meet either of his assailants, who 
surrounded him. Men sometimes unite others by 
their capacity ; and sometimes they are able to con- 
centrate masses of men by the force of mere accident. 
No sooner, sir, was this assault upon the senator of 
Massachusetts known, than the people of every loyal 
State, with one voice, avowed their determination to 
defend his position and liis principles. The great 
revolution began in I80G, wliich culminated finally 



94 ADBEESS OF HON. N. P. BANKS. 

in the war ; and the incorporation, for the first time, 
of the principles of the Declaration of Independence 
into the text and body of the Constitntion of the 
Republic is due to the union formed by the people of 
the loyal States over his prostrate body in the Senate 
of the United States. And now, sir, that he is taken 
away, we feel that in the fulness of his time he had 
come to another point of union, when he, if his life 
had been spared, would have led us to other and 
necessary changes in the policy and character of the 
government. This, sir, is what we lose. It is this, 
sir, which makes us pause, and ask not of man, but of 
God, What is your will ? and what is our duty ? The 
great man of whom we spoke the other day — I am 
not ashamed nor afraid to speak of Mr. Fillmore as a 
great and patriotic man — had finished liis career. 
Other illustrious senators have passed away. They 
had fulfilled their mission; there was no further duty 
for them ; and God in his providence took them to 
himself. But this man whom we mourn, who lies 
in the Capitol at Washington, and over whom, even 
this moment, is being pronounced the benediction of 
the people, — this man had just commenced life. He 
had dismissed many of the personal considerations 
which had controlled him, and was ready for new 
fields of service, as essential to the prosperity of the 
black man, to whom he had dedicated his earher hfe, 
as to that of his own race. The people of the coun- 
try would have turned to him, not, perhaps, as a 
standard-bearer, — tliere are always standard-bearers 



ADDRESS OF HON. N. P. RANKS. 95 

enougli, — but as a man who coiild have given advice 
which the people of the north, sou^h, east, and 
west, would have gladly followed. Thus separated 
from all personal controversies and personal interests, 
the country would have accepted his 'judgment, and 
followed his suggestion ; knowing too well, that when 
he stood alone, with scarcely a man to back him, and 
a whole country against him, he had judged justly, 
and advised them wisely. It is for this, sir, that 
we should regret his loss. Where is the man to 
supply his place ? Undoubtedly it will hereafter be 
supphed. Men have been thus supplied heretofore, 
and will be again. If he were with us, there would 
be multitudes who would accept his counsels, assured 
of safety for the futui'e. But om- loss is his gain. It 
is not for the dead, but the living, that we mourn. 
He is this hour,— yes, this hour,— in the enjoyment 
of a purer liberty than any that ever entered into his 
conception, or that has ever been enjoyed by man. 

" But there is a liberty unsung 
By poets, and by senators unpraised ; 
Which monarchs cannot grant, nor all the powers 
Of earth and hell confederate take away, — 
A liberty which persecution, fraud. 
Oppression, prisons, have no power to bind ; 
Which whoso tastes can be enslaved no more : 
'Tis liberty of heart, derived from Heaven, 
Bought with His blood who gave it to mankind, 
And sealed with the same token. It is held 
By charter, and that charter sanctioned sure 
By the unimpeachable and awful oath 



96 



ADDRESS OF HON. N. P. BANKS. 



And promise of a God. His other gifts 

All bear the royal stamp that speaks them his, 

And are august ; but this transcends them all." 



And these are now the joy and reward of the 
illustrious dead senator of Massachusetts. 




The body of Charles Sumner lying in state, in Doric Hall, State House, Boston. 



EULOGY OF HON. CAEL SCHUEZ. 

PKONOUNCED .BEFORE THE CITY AUTHORITIES OF BOSTON, AT 
THE MUSIC HALL, WEDNESDAY, APRIL 29, 1874. 



The exercises began at three o'clock, witli a vol- 
untary by Bacli on the organ, at which B. J. Lang 
presided. The following hymn by Storch was then 
sung by a portion of the Apollo Club : — 

PRAYER. 

Hear us, Almighty One ! 
Hear us, All-Holy One ! 

Dark rolls the battle before us : 
Father, all praise to thee! 
Father, all thanks to thee! 

That freedom's banner is o'er us. 

Like a consuming brand. 
Stretch forth thy mighty hand, 

Over oppression victorious. 
Help us maintain the right ; 
Help us, O God of might. 

Help us ! thy cause must be glorious. 

9 97 



98 EULOGY OF HON. CARL SCHUEZ. 

Help us, though we may fall : 
From out the grave we call, 

Praise to thy mci'cy forever. 
All power and glory be 
Thine through eternity ! 

Help us, Almighty One I • 

Amen, Amen. 

At the close of the hymn, prayer was offered by 
the Rev. Phillips Brooks. 

PRAYER BY THE REV. PHILLIPS BROOKS. 

Mayor Cobl? introduced the Rev. Phillips Brooks, 
who offered the following prayer, while the bowed 
assembly preserved a perfect silence : — 

Let us pray. Almighty God, Father of our souls, 
and Master of all the destinies of men, open the gates 
of thy presence, we beseech thee, to thy children, 
and let them enter in to thee. We dare not speak 
of the great men who are thy gifts, except in thy 
presence, filled with thy love, and enlightened by thy 
inspiration. Father, we thank thee for the character 
of the great man whom we commemorate to-day. 
We thank thee for his truth and earnestness. When 
men trembled at duty, and were afraid of it, he did 
it faithfully. When corruption hung like a pesti- 
lence over our land, he stood up above it, brave and 
pure. His heart was full of care for the humblest 
of the race, and the most oppressed. We thank thee, 
our Father, for the truth and manliness that filled 
his life. We know that the character of a good man 



EULOGY OF HOK. CARL SCHURZ. 99 

is thy best gift to tliy children ; and so we thank 
thee, first of all and most of all, that this thy ser- 
vant was what he was. And we thank thee, also, 
for the work which it was permitted him to do. As 
we stand and look around, and see the prosperity 
and peace, the liberty and truth and justice, that so 
largely pervade our land, we see in that the fruit 
of tlie seed which he helped to plant ; the issue of the 
struggle in which he lived and suffered. We rejoice 
to-day for him, O Father, that thou didst give him 
so al)undantly of that which he loved the best, the 
privilege of serving his native country. Wherever, 
O God, the work that Sumner tried to do still lingers 
incomplete, wherever any bond to the world of sin 
still remains, wherever man still dares to forget 
righteousness, wherever any false standards still in- 
fest the purity of public life, and falsify and retard 
the work in which thou didst so richly use this ser- 
vant whom thou hast taken to thyself, give us great 
men. Give us strong, good men, who shall tlior- 
oughl}^ know thy will, and teach it to us all, and 
who, by the strength that thou shalt give to them, 
shall lead thy people in thy way. We beg thy 
blessing, O our Father, to rest upon our State, and 
upon our land. Give wisdom and strength to the 
President of the United States, and to all others in 
authority. Give, we implore thee, unto him who 
shall sit in the chair which our great senator has left 
empty, a heart and mind as pure as his. Teach all 
our senators wisdom, and be thyself the Governor 
of those whom thou hast sent to govern us. And 



100 EULOGY OF HON. GAEL SCHUEZ. 

now, what shall we ask, O Father, for ourselves, as 
we stand here clesn-oiis to commemorate the great 
man whom thou hast taken to thyself, the good and 
faithful servant whom thou hast called away ? What 
can we ask, but that our own living shall be doubly 
consecrated to our duties? In deeper purity, in 
more enduring unselfishness, in broader wisdom, in 
a courage that nothing can frighten, and an integrity 
that nothing can seduce, may we be wholly conse- 
crated to duty ; and may we lay our humble lives, 
like strong, unnoticed stones, in that structure of 
rio-hteousness and truth and wisdom which thou art 
building in our land. To some such self-consecra- 
tion may we all be uplifted by the memorial service 
of to-day ! 

The following hymn, written by Oliver Wendell 
Holmes for the occasion, was then sung to a national 
air of Holland, l)y the Apollo Club : — 

Once more, ye sacred towers, 

Your solemn dirges sound : 
Strew, loving hands, the April flowers, 
Once more to deck his mound. 

A nation mourns its dead, 

Its sorrowing voices one, 
As Israel's monarch bowed his head, 
And cried, " My son ! My son 1 " 

Why mourn for him ? For him 
The welcome angel came 
Ere yet his eye with age was dim, 
Or bent his stately frame : 



EULOGY OF HON. CARL SCHURZ. 101 

His weapon still was bright ; 
His shield was lifted high 
To slay the wrong, to save the right : 
What happier hour to die ? 

Thou orderest all things well : 
Thy servant's work was done ; 

He lived to hear oppression's knell, 
The shouts for freedom won. 
Hark I From the opening skies 
The anthem's echoing swell, — 

" O mourning land ! lift up thine eyes I 
God reigneth. All is well. " 

Mr. Wendell Phillips then came forward, and in 
the following remarks introduced the orator of the 
day : — 

Me. Mayor and Fellow-Citizens, — The Com- 
monwealth has met with an irreparable loss, a loss 
which it tasks our language to describe. A con- 
secrated life bravely and solemnly ended ; a great 
work left, in the providence of God, unfinished, — 
the completion of which not many of us, I fear, 
will now live to see. We meet to pay another 
tribute of respect to the memory of the greatest man 
and the purest that Massachusetts has lent to the 
national councils during this generation or the 
last ; the one who has done the nation more service, 
and earned the State more honor, than any other. If 
we measure greatness by rare abilities, lofty purpose, 
grand achievement, and a spotless life, then neither 
this generation nor the last has, in Massachusetts, any 
civil name worthy to stand by the side of Charles 

9* 



102 EULOGY OF HOX. CARL SCHUEZ. 

Sumner, the last martyr, literally a martyr in the 
cause of free speech and personal liberty. 

AVe meet to contemplate his portrait drawn by a 
master-hand. Xo loving and partial friendship, be- 
gun in boyhood, and grown closer year by 3"ear, will 
hold the pencil. No city or State pride will unduly 
heighten the colors. And this is well ; for Sumner 
belonged not to Massachusetts alone, but to the 
nation and the world. From the lips of one born in 
a foreign land, and dwelling in a far-off State ; one 
who shared our great senator's official labors, and 
was his comrade in study, and his near friend, — we 
shall hear the verdict — the solemn, the sober, and 
dispassionate verdict — which the world and posterity 
will render ; which history, proud of her fr'ust, will 
carry down to other generations. And as long as 
men lo.ve justice and hate oppression, as long as they 
value the devotion of great powers to the welfare of 
the race, as long as they need to learn how the battle 
for liberty is to be won when fought against almost 
hopeless odds, so long we may be sure they will 
lovingly guard the record. As such an historian, in 
this sad, proud hour of bereavement, I have the honor 
to introduce Mr. Schurz of Missouri. 

At the conclusion of Mr. Phillips's address, Mr. 
Schurz came forward, and, in the midst of subdued 
applause, began his eulogy. 

THE ORATIOX. 

When the news went forth, " Charles Sumner is 
dead," a tremor of strange emotion was felt all over 



EULOGY OF HON. CARL SCHURZ. 103 

tlie land. It was as if a magnificent star, a star un- 
like all others, which the living generation had been 
wont to behold fixed and ammovable above their 
heads, had all at once disappeared from the sky ; and 
the people stared into the great void darkened by 
the sudden absence of the familiar light. On the 16th 
of JNIarch a funeral procession passed through the 
streets of Boston. Uncounted thousands of men, 
women, and children had assembled to see it pass. No 
uncommon pageant had attracted them ; no military 
parade, with glittering uniforms and gay banners ; 
no pompous array of dignitaries in official robes ; 
nothing but carriages, and a hearse with a coffin, and 
in it the corpse of Charles Sumner. But there they 
stood — a multitude immeasurable to the eye, rich 
and poor, white and black, old and young — in grave 
and mournful silence, to bid a last sad farewell to 
him who was being borne to his grave. And every 
breeze from every point of the compass came loaded 
with a sigh of sorrow. Indeed, there was not a city 
or town in this great Republic which would not have 
surrounded that funeral procession with the same 
spectacle of a profound and universal sense of great 
bereavement. Was it love ; was it gratitude for the 
services rendered to the people ; was it the bafiled ex- 
pectation of greater services still to come ; was it 
admiration of his talents or his virtues, — that inspired 
so general an emotion of sorrow ? He had stood 
aloof from the multitude. The friendship of his heart 
had been given to l)ut few : to the many he had ap- 
peared distant, self-satisfied, and cold. His public 



104 EULOGY OF HON. GAEL SCHUEZ. 

life had been full of bitter conflicts; No man had 
aroused against himself fiercer animosities. Although 
warmly recognized by many, the public services of 
no man had been more acrimoniously questioned by 
opponents. No statesman's motives, qualities of 
heart and mind, wisdom and character, except his 
integrity, had been the subject of more heated con- 
troversy ; and yet, when sudden death snatched him 
from us, friend and foe bowed their heads alike. 
Every patriotic citizen felt poorer than the day be- 
fore. Every true American heart trembled with the 
apprehension that the Republic had lost something it 
could ill spare. Even from far-distant lands, across 
the ocean, voices came mingling theu' sympathetic 
grief with our own. When you, Mr. Mayor, in the 
name of the City Government of Boston, invited me 
to interpret that which millions think and feel, I 
thanked you for the proud privilege you had con- 
ferred upon me ; and the invitation appealed so irre- 
sistibly to my friendship for the man we had lost, 
that I could not decline it. And yet the thought 
struck me, that you might have prepared a greater 
triumph to his memory, had you summoned not me 
his friend, but one of those who had stood against 
him in the struggles of his life, to bear testimony to 
Charles Sumner's virtues. There are many among 
them to-day, to whose sense of justice you might 
have safely confided the office, which to me is a task 
of love. Here I see his friends around me, — the 
friends of his youth, of his manhood, of his advan- 
cing age ; among them, men whose illustrious names 



EULOGY OF HON. CARL SCHUEZ. 105 

are household words as far as the English tongue is 
spoken, and far beyond. I saw them standing 
round his open grave, when it received the flower- 
decked coffin, mute sadness heavily clouding their 
brows. I understood their grief, for nobody could 
share it more than I. In such a presence the temp- 
tation is great to seek that consolation for our loss 
which bereaved friendship finds in the exaltation of 
its bereavement. But not to you or me belonged this 
man while he lived : not to you or me belongs his 
memory now that he is gone. His deeds, his example,, 
and his fame, he left as a legacy to the American 
people and to mankind ; and it is my office to speak 
of this inheritance. I cannot speak of it without 
affection. I shall endeavor to do it with justice. 
Among the public characters of America, Charles 
Sumner stands peculiar and unique. His senatorial 
career is a conspicuous part of our political history. 
But, in order to appreciate the man in the career, we 
must look at the story of his life. 

MR, Sumner's ancestry and early life. 

The American people take pride in saying that 
almost all their great historic characters were self- 
made men, who, without the advantages of wealth 
and early opportunities, won their education, raised 
themselves to usefulness and distinction. A log 
cabin ; a ragged little boy, walking barefooted to a 
lowly country schoolhouse, or sonietimes no school- 
house at all ; a lad, after a day's hard toil on the 
farm, or in the workshop, poring greedily, sometimes 



106 EULOGY OF HON. CARL SCHURZ. 

stealthily, over a volume of poetry, or historj^ or 
travels ; a forlorn-looking youth, with elbows out, 
applying at a lawyer's oiBce -for an oppo/tunity to 
study ; then the young man a successful practitioner, 
attracting the notice of his neighbors ; then a mem- 
ber of the State legislature, a representative in Con- 
gress, a senator, maybe a cabmet-minister, or even 
president, — such are the pictures presented Ijy many 
a proud American Ijiography. And it is natural that 
the American people should be proud of it; for such 
a biography condenses, in the compass of a single life, 
the great story of the American nation, as from 
the feebleness and misery of early settlements in the 
bleak solitude, it advanced to the subjugation of the 
hostile forces of nature, plunged into an arduous 
struggle with dangers and difficulties only known to 
itself, gathering strength from every conflict, and 
experience from, every trial, until at last it stands 
there as one of the greatest powers of the earth. 
But not such a life was that of Charles Sumner. 
He was descended from good old Kentish yeomanry 
stock : men stalwart of frame, stout of heart, who 
used to stand in the front of the fierce battles of Old 
England. But already, from the year 1723, a long 
line of Sumners appears on the records of Harvard 
College ; and it is evident that the love of study had 
long been hereditary in the family. Charles Pinck- 
ney Sumner, the senator's father, was a graduate of 
Harvard, a lawyer by profession, for fourteen years 
high-sheriff of Suffolk County. He was, altogether, 
a man of liigh respectability. He was not rich, but 



EULOGY OF HON. GAEL SCKURZ. 107 

iu good circumstances, and well aLle to give his chil- 
dren the best opportunities to study, without working 
for their daily bread. Charles Sumner was born in 
Boston, on the 6th of January, 1811. At the age of 
ten he had received his rudimentary training: at 
fifteen, after having gone through the Boston Latin 
vSchool, he entered Harvard College, and plunged at 
once with fervor into the classics, polite literature, 
and history. Graduated in 1830, he entered the 
Cambridge Law School. Now hfe began to open to 
him. Judge Story, his most distinguished teacher, 
soon recognized in hiin a young man of uncommon 
stamp ; and an intimate friendship sprang up be- 
tween teacher and pupil, which was severed only by 
death. His productive labor began; and I find it 
stated that already then, when he was yet a pupil, 
his essays, published" in " The American Jurist," 
were " already characterized by breadth of view and 
accuracy of learning, and sometimes by remarkably 
subtle and ingenious investigations." 

Leaving the Law School, he entered the office of a 
lawyer in Boston, to acquire a knowledge of practice, 
never much to his taste. Then he visited Washing- 
ton for the first time, was received with marked 
kindness by Chief-Justice Marshall; and, in later 
years, loved to tell his friends how he had sat at the 
feet of that great magistrate, and learned there what 
a judge should be. Having been admitted to the 
bar in Worcester in 1884, when twenty-three years 
old, he opened an office in Boston ; was soon ap- 
pointed reporter of the United States Circuit Court ; 



108 EULOGY OF HON. CATIL SCHURZ. 

published three volumes containing Judge Story's 
decisions, known as " Sumner's Reports ; " took Judge 
Story's place, from time to time, as lecturer in the 
Harvard Law School, also Prof. Greenleaf's, who 
was absent ; and edited, during the years 1835 and 
1836, Andrew Dunlap's Treatise on Admiralty 
Practice. Beyond this, his studies, arduous, inces- 
sant, and thorough, ranged far and wide. But what 
he had learned and could learn at home did not sat- 
isfy his craving. In 1837 he went to Europe, armed 
with a letter from Judge Story's hand to the law 
magnates of England ; to whom his patron introduced 
him as "a young lawyer, giving promise of the most 
eminent distinction in his profession, with truly ex- 
traordinary attainments, literary and judicial, and a 
gentleman of the highest purity and propriety of 
character." 

In England young Sumner, only feeling himself 
standing on the threshold of life, was received like a 
man of already achieved distinction. Every circle 
of a society ordina.rily so exclusive was open to him. 
(^ten, by invitation, he sat with the judges in West- 
minster Hall. Renowned statesmen introduced him 
on the floor of the House of Parliament. Scientific 
associations received him as a welcome guest ; and 
the learned and great willingly opened to his win- 
ning presence their stores of knowledge and states- 
manship. In France he listened to the eminent men 
of the Law School in Paris, at the Sorbonne, and the 
College de France ; and Avith many of the statesmen 
of that country he maintained instructive intercourse. 



EULOGY OF HON. CARL SCHURZ. 109 

In Italy lie gave himself up to the charms of art, his- 
tory, and classical literature. In Germany he enjoyed 
the conversation of Humboldt, of Ranke the histo- 
rian, of Ritter the geographer, and of the great jurists, 
Savigny, Thibaut, and Mittermaier. He returned 
to his native shores iti 1840, himself Hke a heavily- 
freighted ship, bearing a rich cargo of treasures col- 
lected in foreign lands. He resumed the practice of 
law in Boston ; but, as I find it stated, " not with 
remarkable success in a financial point of view." 
That I readily believe. 

THE OPENTN'G OP HIS PUBLIC CAEEEE. 

But now the time had come when a new field of 
action was to open itself to him. On the Fourth of 
July, 1845, he delivered before the city authorities 
of Boston an address on " The True Grandeur of 
Nations." So far, he had been only a student — a 
deep and arduous one — and a writer and a teacher, 
but nothing more. On that day his public career 
commenced. And his first public address disclosed 
at once the pecuhar impulse and inspirations of liis 
heart, and the tendencies of his mind. It was a plea 
for universal peace, a poetic rhapsody on the wrongs 
and horrors of war, and the beauties of concord ; not, 
indeed, without solid argument, but that argument 
clothed in all the gorgeousness of historical illustra- 
tion, classic imagery, and fervid effusion, rising high 
above the level of existing conditions, and picturing 
an ideal future, — the universal reign of justice and 
charity. And this speech he delivered while the 

10 



110 EULOGY OF HON. CARL SCHUEZ. 

citizen-soldiery of Boston in festive array were stand- 
ing before him, and while the very air was stirred by 
the premonitory mutterings of an approaching war. 
The whole man revealed himself in that utterance, — 
a soul full of the native instinct of justice ; an over- 
powering sense of right and wrong, which made him 
look at the problems of human society from the lofty- 
plane of an ideal morality, which fixed for him, high 
beyond the existing condition of things, the aims for 
which he must strive, and inspired and fired his 
ardent nature for the struggle. He had also learned 
to work, to work hard, and with a purpose. And 
at thirty-four, when he first appeared conspicuously 
before the people, he could already point to many 
results of his labor. Such was the man, when, in 
the exuberant vigor of manhood, he entered puUic 
life. Until that time he had entertained no as})ira- 
tions for a political career. When discussing with a 
friend of his youth — now a man of fame — what the 
future might have in store for them, he said, " You 
may be a senator of the United States, some day ; 
bul: nothing would make me hapj^ier than to be pres- 
ident of Harvard College." And in later years he 
publicly declared, " With the ample opportunities of 
private life I was content. No tombstone for me 
could bear a fairer inscription than this : ' Here lies 
one who, without the honors or emoluments of pub- 
lic station, did something for his fellow-men.' " But 
lie found the slavery question in his path ; or, rather, 
the slavery question seized upon him. The advocate 
of universal peace, of the eternal reign of justice and 



EULOGY OP HON. GAEL SGHUEZ. Ill 

charity, could not fail to see in slavery the embodi- 
ment of .universal war of man against man, of abso- 
lute injustice and oppression. 

The idealist found a living question to deal with, 
which, like a flash of lightning, struck into the very 
depth of his soul, and set it on fire. The whole ardor 
of his nature broke out in the enthusiasm of the 
anti-slavery man. In a series of glowing addresses 
and letters, he attacked the great wrong. He pro- 
tested against the jNIexican war ; he assailed with pow- 
erful strokes the Fugitive-Slave Law ; he attempted 
to draw the Whig party into a decided anti-slavery 
policy ; and, when that failed, he broke through his 
party affiliations, and joined the small band of Free- 
soilers. His legal mind found in the Constitution no 
express recognition of slavery'; and he consistently 
construed it as a warrant of freedom. This placed 
him in the ranks of those who were called " political 
abolitionists." He did not think of the sacrifices 
which this obedience to his moral impulses might 
cost liim. For, at that time, abolitionism was by no ' 
means a fashionable thing. An anti-slavery man Avas 
then, even in Boston, positively the horror of a large 
portion of polite society. And that the highly re- 
fined Sumner, who was so learned and able, who had 
seen the world, and mixed with the highest social 
circles in Europe ; that such a man should go among 
the abolitionists, and not only sjmpathize with them, 
but work with them, and expose himself to the 
chance of being dragged thi'ough the streets by vul- 
gar hands, with a rope round his neck, hke William 



112 EUT.OGT OF HON. CARL SCHURZ. 

Lloyd Garrison, — that was a thing at which the pohte 
society of that clay wonld revolt, and which no man 
conld undertake withovit danger of being severely 
dropped. But that was the thing which the refined 
Sumner actually 'did, probably without giving a mo- 
ment's thought to the possible consequences. He 
went even so far as openly to defy that dictatorship 
which Daniel Webster had for so many years been 
exercising over the political mind of INIassachusetts, 
and which then was about to exert its power in favor 
of a compromise with slavery. But times were 
changing ; and, only six years after the delivery of his 
first popular address, he was elected to the Senate of 
the United States by a combination of Democrats 
and Free-soilers. 

HIS FIRST ENTRANCE INTO THE SENATE. 

Charles Sumner entered the Senate on the first day 
of December, 1851 ; he entered as the successor of 
Daniel Webster, who had been appointed secretary 
of state ; on that same 1st of December, Henry 
Clay spoke his last word in the Senate, and then left 
the chamber, never to return, — a striking and most 
significant coincidence : Henry Clay disappeared 
from public life ; Daniel Webster left the Senate, 
drawing near his end ; Charles Sumner stepped upon 
the scene. The close of one and the setting in of 
another epoch in the history of the American Repub- 
lic were portrayed in the exit and entry of these men. 
Clay and Webster had appeared in the councils of 
the nation in the early part of this century. The 



EULOGY OF HON. CARL SCHUEZ. 113 

Republic was then still in its childhood, in almost 
every respect still an untested experiment, an un- 
solved problem. Slowly and painfully had it strug- 
gled through the first conflicts of constitutional 
theories, and acquired only an uncertain degree of 
national consistency. There were the somewhat un- 
ruly democracies of the States, with their fresh rev- 
olutionary reminiscence, their instincts of entirely 
independent sovereignty, and their now and then 
seemingly divergent interests ; and the task of bind- 
ing them firmly together was far from being entirely 
accomplished. The United States, not yet compacted 
by the means of rapid locomotion which to-day 
make every inhabitant of the land a neighbor of the 
national capital, were then still a straggling con- 
federacy ; and the members of that confederacy had, 
since the triumphant issue of the Revolution, more 
common memories of severe trials, sufferings, embar- 
rassments, dangers, and anxieties together, than of 
cheering successes and of assured prosperity and 
well-being. 

The great powers of the Old World, fiercely con- 
tending among themselves for the mastery, trampled, 
without remorse, upon the neutral rights of the 
young and feeble Republic. A war was impending 
with one of them, bringing on disastrous reverses, 
and spreading alarm and discontent over the land. 
A dark cloud of financial difficulty hung over the 
nation. And the danger from abroad and embarrass- 
ments at home were heightened by a restless party 
spirit, which every newly-arising question seemed to 

10* 



114 EULOGY OF HON. CAKL SCHURZ. 

iml)itter. It was under such circumstances that 
Henry Chxy first, and Daniel Webster shortly after 
him, stepped upon the scene, and at once took their 
station in the foremost rank of public men. On this 
field of action Clay and Webster stood in the front 
rank of an illustrious array of contemporaries, — Clay, 
the originator of measures and policies, with his in- 
ventive and organizing mind, not rich in profound 
ideas, or in knowledge gathered by book stud}^ but 
learning as he went ; quick in the perception of 
existing wants and difficulties, and of the means 
within reach to satisfy the one and overcome the 
other; and a born captain also, a marshaller of 
parties, whose very presence and voice, like a signal 
blast, created and wielded organization : and by his 
side Daniel Webster, with that awful vastness of 
brain, a tremendous storehouse of thought and 
knowledge, which gave forth its treasures with 
ponderous majesty of utterance ; he, not an originator 
of measures and policies, but a mighty advocate, the 
greatest advocate this country ever knew, a huge 
Atlas, who carried the Constitution on his shoulders ; 
he" could have carried tliere the whole moral 
grandeur of the nation, had he never compromised 
his own. 

Such men filled the stage during that period of 
construction, and conservative national organization, 
devoting the best efforts of their statesmanship to 
the purpose of raising their country to greatness in 
wealth and power, of making the people proud of 
their common nationality, and of embedding the 



EULOGY OF HON. GAEL SCHURZ. 115 

Union in the contentment of prosperity, in enlight- 
ened patriotism, national law, and constitutional 
principle. 

THE SLAVERY QUESTION, AND THE BmTH OF THE 
PARTY OF FREEDOM. 

But, among the problems which the statesmen of 
that period had grappled with, there was one which 
had eluded their grasp. It was a conflict grounded 
deep in the moral nature of men, — the slavery ques- 
tion. In their anxiety to avert every danger threat- 
ening the Union, they attempted to repress the 
slavery question by compromise, and apparently 
with success, at least for a while. But, however 
firmly those compromises seemed to stand, there was 
a force of nature at work, which, like a restless flood, 
silently but unceasingly and irresistibly washed their 
foundations away, until at last the towering structure 
toppled down. The anti-slavery movement is now 
one of the great chapters of our past history. It 
may be hoped that even the people of the South, if 
they do not yet appreciate the spirit which created 
and guided the anti-slavery movement, will not much 
longer misunderstand it. They looked upon it as the 
offspring of a wanton desire to meddle with other 
people's affairs ; or as the product of hypocritical self- 
ishness assuming the mask and cant of philanthropy, 
merely to rob the South, and to enrich New England ; 
or as an insidious contrivance of criminally reckless 
political ambition, striving to grasp and monopolize 
power at the risk of destroying a pfirt of the country, 



116 EULOGY OF HON. CARL SCHURZ. 

or even the whole. No idea ever agitated the popu- 
lar mind to whose origin calculating selfishness was 
more foreign. Even the great uprising which 
brought about the War of Independence was less free 
from selfish motives ; for it sprang from resistance to 
a tyrannical abuse of the taxing-power. Then the 
people rose against that oppression which touched 
their property : the anti-slavery movement originated 
in an impulse only moral. It was the irresistible 
breaking-out of a trouble of conscience, — a trouble 
of conscience which had already disturbed the men 
who made the American Republic. It was repressed 
for a time by material interest, by the greed of gain, 
when the peculiar product of slave-labor became one 
of the principal staples of the country, and a mine of 
wealth. But the trouble of conscience raised its 
voice again, shrill and defiant as when your own 
John Quincy Adams stood in the halls of Congress, 
and when devoted advocates of the rights of men 
began and carried on, in the face of ridicule and 
brutal persecution, an agitation seemingly hopeless. 

Commerce said, " Do not disturb slavery ; for its 
products fill our ships, and are one of the principal 
means of our exchanges." Industry said, " Do not 
disturb slavery ; for it feeds our machinery, and gives 
us markets." The greed of wealth said, " Do not dis- 
turb slavery ; for it is an inexhaustible fountain of 
riches." Political ambition said, "• Do not disturb 
slavery ; for it furnishes us combinations and com- 
promises to keep parties alive, and to malvO power the 
price of shrewd management." An anxious states- 



EULOGY OF HON. GAEL SCHURZ. 117 

manship said, " Do not disturb slavery ; for you might 
break to pieces the union of these States." There 
never was a more formidaWe combination of inter- 
ests and influences than that which confronted the 
anti-slavery movement in its earlier stages. And 
what was its answer ? " Whether all you say be 
true or false, it matters not ; but slavery is wrong." 
Slavery is wrong. That one word was "enough. It 
stood there like a huge rock in the sea, shivering 
to spray the waves dashing upon it. Interest, 
greed, argument, vituperation, calumny, ridicule, 
persecution, patriotic appeal, — it was all in vain. 
Amidst all the storm and assault, that one word 
stood there unmoved, intact, and impregnable, — slave- 
ry is wrong. At the tune when Mr. Sumner entered 
the Senate, the hope of final victory appeared as 
distant as ever ; but it only appeared so. The states- 
men of the past period had just succeeded in building 
up the compromise which admitted California as 
a free State, and imposed upon the Republic the Fugi- 
tive-Slave Law. That compromise, like all its prede- 
cessors, was considered and called- a final settlement. 
Fidelity to it was looked upon as a test of true pat- 
riotism, and as a qualification necessary for the pos- 
session of political power. Opposition to it was 
denounced as factious, unpatriotic-, revolutiona-ry 
demagogism, little short of treason. An overwhehn- 
ing majority of the American people acquiesced in it. 
But, deep down, men's conscience, like a volcanic fire, 
was restless, ready for a new outbreak as soon as 
the thin crust of compromise should crack. One 



118 EULOGY OF HON. CARL SCHURZ. 

of tliose eternal laws which govern the development 
of human affairs asserted itself, — the law that a great 
wrong, which has been maintained in defiance of the 
moral sense of mankind, must finally, by the very 
means and measures necessary for its sustenance, 
render itself so insupportable as to insure its down- 
fall and destruction. 

So it was with slavery. I candidly acquit the 
American slave-2)ower of wilful and wanton aggres- 
sion upon the liberties and general interests of the 
American people. If slavery Avas to be kept alive at 
all, its supporters could not act otherwise than as 
they did. Slavery could not live and thrive in an 
atmosphere of free inquiry and untrammelled discus- 
sion : therefore free inquiry and discussion touch- 
ing slavery had to be suppressed. Slavery could not 
be secure, if slaves escaping merely across a State- 
line thereby escaped the grasp of their masters: 
hence an effective fugitive-slave law was impera- 
tively demanded. Slavery could not protect its in- 
terests in the Union, unless its power balanced that 
of the free States in the national councils ; there- 
fore, by colonization or conquest, the number of slave 
States had to be augmented : hence the annexation of 
Texas, the Mexican war, and intrigues for the acqui- 
sition of Cuba. Slavery could not maintain the 
equilibrium of power, if it permitted itself to be 
excluded from the national Territories : hence the 
breaking-down of the Missouri Compromise, and 
the usurpation in Kansas. Thus slavery was pushed 
on and on by the inexorable logic of its existence : 



EULOGY OF HON. CARL SCHUEZ. 119 

tlie slave-masters were only the slaves of the necessi- 
ties of slavery ; and all their seeming exactions and 
usurpations were merely a struggle for its life. IMany 
of their demands had been satisfied, on the part of the 
North, by submission or compromise. But, when the 
slave-power went so far as to demand for slavery 
the great domain of the nation which had been held 
sacred for freedom forever, then the people of the 
North suddenly understood that the necessities of 
slavery demanded what they could not yield ; and 
the final struggle began. It was made inevitable by 
the necessities of slavery : it was, indeed, an " irre- 
pressible conflict." 

That was the historic significance of the remarka- 
ble scene which showed us Henry Clay walking out 
of the Senate-chamber, never to return, when Charles 
Sumner sat down there as the successor of Daniel 
Webster. He brought to the Senate a studious 
mind, vast learning, great legal attainments, a pow- 
erful eloquence, a strong and ardent nature.; and all 
this he vowed to one service. He introduced himself 
into the debates of the Senate — the slavery ques- 
tion having been silenced forever, as politicians then 
thought — by several speeches on other subjects, the 
reception of Kossuth, the land policy, ocean postage ; 
but they were not remarkable, and attracted but 
little attention. 

HIS rmST ASSAULT ON" THE SLAVE-POWEE. 

At last he availed himself of an appropriation bill 
to attack the Fugitivc.-Slave Law ; and at once a spirit 



120 EULOGY OF HON. CARL SCHUEZ. 

broke forth in that first word on the great question 
which startled every hstener. Thus he opened the 
argument: "Painfully convinced of the unutterable 
wrong and woo of slavery; profoundly believing 
that, according to the true spirit of the Constitution, 
and the sentiments of the fathers, it can find no place 
under our National Government, I could not allow 
this session to reach its close without making or 
seizing an opportunity to declare myself openly 
against the usurpation, injustice, and cruelty of the 
late intolerant enactment for the recovery of fugitive 
slaves." Then this significant declaration : " What- 
ever I am, or may be, I freely offer to this cause. 
1 have never been a politician. The slave of princi- 
ple, I call no party master. By sentiment, educa- 
tion, and conviction, a friend of human rights in their 
utmost expansion, I have ever most sincerely em- 
braced the democratic idea ; not, indeed, as repre- 
sented or professed by any party, but according to 
its real significance, as transfigured in the Declara- 
tion of Independence, and in the injunctions of 
Christianity. In this idea I see no narrow advantage 
merely for individuals or classes, but the sovereignty 
of the people, and the greatest happiness of all se- 
cured by equal laws." 

A vast array of historical research and of legal 
argument was then called up to prove the section- 
alism of slavery, the nationalism of freedom, and the 
unconstitutionality of the Fugitive-slave Act, fol- 
lowed by this bold declaration: "By the supreme law 
which commands me to do no injustice, by the com- 



EULOGY OF HON. CARL SCHURZ. 121 

prehensive Cliristian law of brotlierliooci, by the 
Constitution I have sworn to support, I am bound to 
disobey this law ; " and the speech closed with this 
solemn quotation : " Beware of the groans of wounded 
souls, since the inward sore will at length break out. 
Oppress not to the utmost a single heart ; for a soli- 
taiy sigh has power to overturn a whole world," 
The amendment to the appropriation bill, moved by 
Mr. Sumner, received only four votes of fifty-one. 
But every hearer had been struck by the words 
spoken as something different from the tone of other 
anti-slavery speeches dehvered in these halls. South- 
ern senators, startled at the peculiarity of the speech, 
called it, in reply, the most extraordinary language 
they had ever listened to. Mr. Chase, supporting 
Sumner in debate, spoke of it " as marking a new 
era in American history, when the anti-slavery idea 
ceased to stand on the defensive, and was boldly 
advancing to the attack.'' Indeed, it had that sig- 
nificance. There stood up in the Senate a man who 
was no politician, but who, on the highest field of 
politics, with a concentrated intensity of feeling and 
purpose never before witnessed there, gave expression 
to a moral unpulse, which, although sleeping per- 
haps for a time, certainly existed in the popular con- 
science ; and which, once become a political force, 
could not fail to produce a great revolution. 
11 



122 EULOGY OF HON. CAUL SCHTJRZ. 

MR. SUMNER'S FAITH, COURAGE, AND DEVOTION, 
AND THEIR SOURCE. 

Charles Sumner possessed all the instincts, the 
courage, the firmness, and the faith of the devotee of 
a great idea. In the Senate he was a member of a 
feeble minority, so feeble, indeed, as to be to the 
ruling power a mere subject of derision, and, for the 
first three years of his service, without organized 
popular support. The slaveholders had been accus- 
tomed to put the metal of their Northern opponents 
to a variety of tests. Many a hot anti-slavery zeal 
had cooled under the social blandishments with 
which the South knew so well to impregnate the at- 
mosphere of the national capital ; and many a high 
courage had given way before the haughty assump- 
tion and fierce menace of Southern men in Congress. 
Mr. Sumner had to pass that ordeal. He was at 
first petted and flattered by Southern society; but 
fond as he was of the charm of social intercourse, 
and accessible to demonstrative appreciation, no 
blandishments could touch his convictions of duty. 
And, when the advocates of slavery turned upon 
him with anger and menace, he hurled at them with 
prouder defiance his answer, repeating itself in 
endless variations : " You must yield, for you are 
wrong." The slave-power had so frequently suc- 
ceeded in making the North yield to its demands, 
even after the most formidable demonstrations of 
reluctance, that it had become a serious question 
whether there existed any such thing as Northern 



EULOGY OP HON. CARL SCHUBZ. 123 

firmness. But it did exist, and in diaries Sumner 
had developed its severest political tj^pe. The 
stronger the assault, the higher rose in him the 
power of resistance. In him lived that spirit which 
not only would not yield, but would turn upon the 
assailant. The Southern force, which believed itself 
irresistible, found itself striking against a body which 
was immovable. To think of yielding to any demand 
of slavery, of making a compromise with it, in how- 
ever tempting a form, was, to his nature, an absolute 
impossibility. 

Mr. Sumner's courage was of a peculiar kind. He 
attacked the slave-power in the most unsparing man- 
ner, when its supporters were most violent in resent- 
ing opposition, and when that violence was always 
apt to proceed from words to blo^vs. One day, while 
Sumner was delivering one of his severest speeches, 
Stephen A. Douglas, walking up and down behind 
the piesident's chair in the old Senate-chamber, and 
listening to him, remarked to a friend, " Do you 
hear that man ? He may be a fool, but I tell you 
that man has pluck. I wonder whether he knows 
himself what he is doing. I am not sure whether I 
should have the courage to say those things to the men 
who are scowling around him." Of all men in the 
Senate-chamber, Sumner was probably least aware 
that the thing he did required pluck. He simply did 
what he felt it his duty to his cause to do. It was to 
him a matter of course. He was like a soldier, who, 
when he has to march upon the enemy's batteries* 
does not say to himself, '-'■ Now I am going to per- 



124 EULOGY OF HON. GAEL SGHURZ. 

form an act of heroism," but who simiDly obeys an 
impulse of duty, and marches forward Avithout think- 
ing of tlie bullets that fly around his head. A 
thought of the boldness of what he has done may 
occur to him afterwards, when he is told of it. 
This was one of the striking peculiarities of Mr. 
Sumner's character, as all those know who knew 
him well. Neither was he conscious of the stinging 
force of the language he frequently employed. He 
simply uttered what he felt to be true, in language 
fitting the strength of his convictions. The indig- 
nation of his moral sense at what he felt to be wrong 
was so deep and sincere, that he thought everybody 
must find the extreme severity of his expressions as 
natural as they came to his own mind. And he was 
not unfrequently surprised, greatly surprised, when 
others found his language offensive. 

As he possessed the firmness and courage, so he 
possessed the faith, of the devotee. From the begin- 
ning, and through all the vicissitudes of the anti- 
slavery movement, his heart was profoundly assured 
that his generation would see slavery entirely extin- 
guished. While travelling in France to restore his 
health, after having been beaten down on the floor of 
the Senate, he visited Alexis de Tocqueville, the 
celebrated author of " Democracy in America." 
Tocqueville expressed his anxiety about the issue 
of the anti-slavery movement, which then had 
suffered defeat by the election of Buchanan. 
" There can be no doubt about the result," said 
Sumner. " Slavery will soon succumb and disap- 



1 

i 



EUIiOGY OF HON. GAEL SCHUEZ. 125 

pear." — " Disappear ! in what way, and how soon? " 
asked Tocqueville. " In what manner I cannot say," 
replied Sumner ; " how soon I cannot say. But it 
will be soon; I feel it, I know it. It cannot be 
otherwise." That was all the reason he gave. " Mr. 
Sumner is a remarkable man," said De Tocqueville, 
afterwards, to a friend of mine. "He says that 
slavery will soon entirely disappear in the United 
States. He does not know how, he does not know 
when ; but he feels it, he is perfectly sure of it. The 
man speaks like a prophet." And so it was. What 
appeared a perplexing puzzle to other men's minds 
was perfectly clear to him. His method of reasoning 
was simple : it was the reasoning of religious faith. 
Slavery is wrong ; therefore it must and will perish : 
freedom is right; therefore 'it must and will prevail. 
And by no power of resistance, by no difficulty, by 
no disappointment, by no defeat, could that faith be 
shaken. For his cause, so great and just, he thought 
nothing impossible, every thing certain. And he was 
unable to understand how others could fail to share 
his faith. 

In one sense he was no party leader. He possessed 
none of the instinct or experience of the politician, 
nor that sagacity of mind which appreciates and 
measures the importance of changing circumstances, 
or the possibihties and opportunities of the day. He 
knew nothing of management, or party manoeuvre. 
He was not seldom accused of doing things calcu- 
lated to frighten the people, and to disorganize the 
anti-slavery forces. He was apt to go rough-shod 

11* 



126 EULOGY OF HON. CARL SCHURZ. 

over the considerations of management deemed im- 
portant by liis co-workers. I believe lie never con- 
sulted with his friends around him before doing 
those things ; and, when they afterwards remonstrated 
with him, he ingenuously asked, " Is it not right and 
true, what I have said ? And, if it is right and true, 
must I not say it ? " And yet, although he had no 
organizing mind, and despised management, he was a 
leader. He was a leader as the embodiment of the 
moral idea, with all its uncompromising firmness, its 
unflagging faith, its daring devotion. Simply obey- 
ing his moral impulse, he dared to say things which 
in the highest legislative body of the Republic nobody 
else would say ; and he proved that they could be 
said, and yet the world would move on. And 
presently the politicians felt encouraged to follow in 
the direction where the idealist had driven a stake . 
ahead. Nay, he forced them to follow ; for they 
knew that the ideahst, whom they could not venture 
to disown, would not fall back at their bidding. 

Nor was that leadership interrupted when, on the 
22d of May, 1856, Preston Brooks of South Carolina, 
maddened by an arraignment of his State and its 
senator, came upon Charles Sumner in the Senate, 
struck him down with heavy blows, and left him on 
the ground, bleeding and insensible. For three years 
Sumner's voice was not heard. But his blood marked 
the vantage-ground from which his party could not 
recede ; and his senatorial chair, kept empty for him 
by the noble people of Massachusetts, stood there in 
most eloquent silenx^e, confirming, sealing, inflaming 



EULOGY OF HON. CARL SCHTJflZ. 127 

all he had said with terrible illustration, a guide-post 
to the onward march of freedom. 

THE OUTBREAK OF THE WAR OF THE REBELLION". 

When, in 1861, the Republican party had taken the 
reins of government in hand, his peculiar leadership 
entered upon a new field of action. The portentous 
shadow of an approaching civil war spread over the 
land. A tremor fluttered through the hearts even of 
strong men in the North, — a vague fear, such as is 
produced by the first rumbling of an earthquake. 
Even Republicans in Congress began to waver. The 
pressure from the country, even in INIassachusetts, in 
favor of compromise, was extraordinary. But a ma- 
jority of the anti-slavery men in the Senate, in their 
front Mr. Sumner, stood firm, feeling that a com- 
promise, giving express constitutional sanction, and 
an indefinite lease of life, to slavery, would be a sur- 
render, and knowing also, that, even by the offer of 
such a surrender, secession and civil war would still be 
insisted on by the Southern leaders. But now the 
time had come when the anti-slavery movement, no 
longer a mere opposition to the demands of the slave- 
power, was to proceed to positive action. The war 
had scarcely commenced in earnest when Mr. Sumner 
urged general emancipation. His unreserved and 
emphatic utterances alarmed the politicians. Our 
armies suffered disaster upon disaster in the field ; 
but Mr. Sumner's convictions could not be repressed. 
In a bold decree of universal liberty, he saw only a 
new source of inspiration and strength. 



128 EULOGY OF HON. CARL SCHURZ. 

One of the danc^ers threatening' us was foreign 

c^ iZJ CD 

interference. No European powers gave us their 
expressed sj'mpathy except Germany and Russia. 
The permanent disruption of the Republic was loudly 
predicted, as if it were desired ; and intervention — 
an intervention which could be only in favor of the 
South — was openly spoken of. A tlireatening spirit, 
disarmed only by timely prudence, had manifested it- 
self in the " Trent" case. It seemed doubtful whether 
the most skilful diplomacy, unaided by a stronger 
force, would be able to avert the danger. But the 
greatest strength of the anti-slavery cause had always 
been in the conscience of mankind. There was our 
natural ally. The cause of slavery as such could 
have no open sympathy among the nations of Europe. 
It stood condemned by the moral sentiment of the 
civilized world. It was obvious that nothing but a 
measure impressing beyond dispute upon our war 
,a decided anti-slavery character, making it in pro- 
fession, what it was inevitably destined to be in fact, 
a war of emancipation, could enlist on our side the 
enlightened public opinion of the Old World so 
strongly as to restrain the hostile spirit of foreign 
governments. 

Thus the moral instinct did not err. The emanci- 
pation policy was not only the policy of principle, 
but also the policy of safety. Mr. Sumner urged it 
with impetuous and unflagging zeal. In the Senate 
he found but little encouracrement. 



EULOGY OP HON. CAP.L SCHURZ. 120 

THE FRIENDSHIP BETWEEN SUMNER AND LINCOLN. 

To the president, tlien, he devoted his efforts. 
Nothing coukl be more interesting, nay, touching, 
than the pecuUar rehitions that sprung up between 
Abraham Lincohi and Charles Sumner. Abraham 
Lincoln was a true child of the people. There was 
in his heart an inexhaustible fountain of tenderness ; 
and from it sprung that longing to be true, just, and 
merciful to all, which made the people love him. 
But he had not grown great in any high school of 
statesmanship. He had, from the humblest begin- 
nings, slowly and laboriously worked himself up ; or, 
rather, he had gradually risen up without being aware 
of it, and suddenly he found himself in the foremost 
rank of the distinguished men of the land. His mar- 
vellous success in his riper years left intact the inborn 
modesty of his nature. His natural gifts were great ; 
he possessed a clear and penetrating mind ; but in 
forming his opinions on subjects of importance, he 
was so careful, conscientious, and diffident, that he 
would always hear and probe what opponents had to 
say, before he became firmly satisfied of the justness 
of his own conclusions. He was not one of those 
bold reformers who will defy the opposition of the 
world, and undertake to impose then- opinions and 
will upon a reluctant age. But every day of great 
responsibility enlarged the horizon of his mind ; and 
every day he grasped the helm of affairs with a 
steadier hand. It was to such a man that Sumner, 
during the most doubtful days at the beginning of 



130 EULOGY OF HON. CARL SCHURZ. 

the war, addressed his appeals for immediate emanci- 
pation, — appeals impetuous and impatient as they 
could spring only from his ardent and overruling con- 
victions. The president at first passively resisted the 
vehement counsel of the senator, but he bade the coun- 
sellor welcome. Mr. Sumner he treated as a favorite 
counsellor, almost like a minister of state, outside 
of the cabinet. In Mr. Sumner he saw a counsellor 
who was no politician, but who stood before him as 
the true representative of the moral earnestness and 
the great inspirations of their common cause. Thus 
Mr. Lincoln, while scarcely ever fully and speedily 
following Sumner's advice, never ceased to ask for it, 
for he knew its significance. Alwaj'-s agreed as to 
the ultimate end, thej^ almost always diifered as to 
times and means ; but, while differing, they firmly 
trusted, for they understood one another. 

Sumner loved to tell his friends, after Lincoln's 
death, how at one time those who disliked and feared 
his intimacy with the president, and desired to see it 
disrupted, thought it was irreparably broken. It was 
at the close of Lincoln's administration in 1865, when 
the president had proposed certain measures of re- 
construction, touching the State of Louisiana. The 
end of the session of Congress was near at hand ; and 
tlie success of the bill depended on a vote of the 
Senate before the hour of adjournmeiit on the 4th 
of Rlarch. Mr. Lincoln had the measure Yevj much 
at heart.. But Sumner opposed it, because it did not 
contain sufficient guarantees for the rights of the 
colored people ; and by a parliamentary manoeuvre, 



EULOGY OF HON. CARL SCHURZ. 131 

simply consuming the time until the adjournment 
came, he, with two or thrfee other senators, succeeded 
in defeating it. The papers already announced that 
the breach between Lincoln and Sumner was com- 
plete, and could not be healed. But those who said 
so did not know the men. On the night of the 6th 
of March, two days after Lincoln's second inaugu- 
ration, the customary inauguration ball was to take 
place. Sumner did not think of attending it ; but 
towards evening he received a card from the presi- 
dent, which read thus : — 

Dear Mr. Sumner, — Unless you send me word to the con- 
trary, I shall this evening call with my carriage at your house, 
to take you with me to the inauguration ball. 
Sincerely yours, 

Abraham Lincoln. 

Mr. Sumner, deeply touched, at once made up his 
mind to go to an inauguration ball for the first time. 
Arrived at tlie ball-room, the president asked Mr. 
Sumner to oifer his arm to Mrs. Lincoln ; and the as- 
tonished spectators, who had been made to beheve that 
the breach between Lincoln and Sumner was irrepara- 
ble, beheld the president's wife on the arm of the 
senator, and the senator, on that occasion of state, in- 
vited to take the scat of honor by the president's side. 
It was thus that Abraham Lincoln composed his quar- 
rels with his friends ; and at his bedside, when he 
died, there was no mourner more deeply afflicted 
than Charles Sumner. During the years of the war, 
so full of vicissitudes, alarms, and anxieties, Sumner 
stood in the Senate, and in the president's closet, as 



132 EULOGY OF HON. CARL SCHTJRZ. 

the ever-watcliful sentinel of freedom and equal 
rights. No occasion eluded his grasp to push on the 
destruction of slavery, not only by sweeping decrees, 
but in detail, by pursuing it, as with a probing-iron, 
into every nook and corner of its existence. Such 
was the character of Mr. Sumner's legislative activity 
during the war. 

THE CLOSE OF THE WAR, AND THE PROBLEMS OF 
RECONSTRUCTION. 

As the Rebellion succumbed, new problems arose. 
To set upon their feet again States disorganized by 
insurrection and civil war ; to remodel a society 
which had been lifted out of its ancient hinges by 
the sudden change of its system of labor ; to protect 
the emancipated slaves against the old pretension 
of absolute control on the part of their former mas- 
ters ; to guard society against the possible transgres- 
sions of a large multitude long held in slavery and 
ignorance, and now suddenly set free ; so to lodge 
political power, in this inflammable state of things, as 
to prevent violent re-actions and hostile collisions ; to 
lead social forces so discordant into orderly and 
fruitful co-operation ; and to infuse into communities, 
but recently rent by the most violent jiassions, a new 
spirit of loyal attachment to a common nationality, — 
this was certainly one of the most perplexing tasks 
ever imposed upon the statesmanship of any time and 
any country. But to Mr. Sumner's mind the prob- 
lem of reconstruction did not appear perjDlexing at 
all. The complexity of the problem, the hazardous 



ETJLOGY OF HON. CARL SCHURZ. 133 

character of the experiment, never troubled him. 
And as, early in the war, he had for himself laid 
down the theory, that, by the very act of rebellion, 
the insurrectionary States had destroyed themselves 
as such : so he argued now, with assured consistency, 
that those States had relapsed into a territorial con- 
dition ; that the National Government had to fill the 
void by creations of its own ; and that in doing so 
the establishment of universal suffrage there was an 
unavoidable necessity. But his constitutional the- 
ory, as well as the measures he proposed, found 
little favor in Congress. The whole power of Pres. 
Johnson's administration was employed to lead to 
the development of things in another du'ection. 
Leaving out of view the soundness of Mr. Sumner's 
" territorial " theory, as to the status of the insur- 
rectionary States after the war, it may be said, and, 
in fact, I have heard it said by many Southern men, 
that had that theory been consistently adhered to, 
and had, in accordance with it, the Southern States 
been kept longer under national control, honestly 
and judiciously exercised, the results, as to their gen- 
eral interests, would probably have been more satis- 
factory to the Southern people themselves than those 
produced by the policy actually followed. But, how- 
ever that may be, Mr. Sumner saw the fondest 
dreams of his life soon realized. Slavery was for- 
ever blotted out -in this Republic, by the thirteenth 
amendment of the Constitution. By the fourteenth 
the emancipated slaves were secured in their rights 
of citizenship before the law ; and the fifteenth guar- 

12 



134 EULOGY OF HON. CARL SCHURZ. 

anteed to them t]ie right to vote. It was indeed a 
most astonishing, a marvellous consummation. What, 
ten years before, not even the most sanguine would 
have ventured to anticipate, what only the profound 
faith of the devotee could believe possible, was done. 

Sumner's statesmanship in foreign affairs. 

While the chamj^ionship of human rights is his 
first title to fame, I should be unjust to his merit did 
I omit to mention the services he rendered on another 
field of action. When, in 1861, the secession of the 
Southern States left the anti-slavery party in the ma- 
jority of the Senate of the United States, Charles 
Sumner was placed, as chairman, at the head of the 
Committee on Foreign Relations. He had, ever since 
his college days, made international law a special and 
favorite study, and was perfectly famihar with its 
j)riuciples, the history of its development, and its 
literature. His knowledge of history was uncom- 
monly extensive and accurate ; and all the leading 
international law-cases, with their incidents in detail, 
their theories and settlements, he had at his fingers' 
ends ; and to his last dsij he remained indefatigable 
in inquiry. No public man had a higher appreciation 
of the j)osition, dignity, and interests of his own 
country ; and no one was less liable than he to be 
carried away, or driven to hasty and ill-considered 
steps, b}^ excited popular clamor. . His abhorrence of 
the barbarities of war, and his ardent love of peace, 
led him earnestly to seek for ever}^ international dif- 
ference a peaceable solution ; and, where no settle- 



ETTLOGY OF HON. GAEL SCHURZ. 135 

ment could be reached by the direct negotiations of 
diplomacy, the idea of arbitration was always upper- 
most in his mind. I am far from claiming for him 
absolute correctness of view, and infallibihty of judg- 
ment, in every case ; but, taking his whole career to- 
gether, it may well be doubted whether, in the whole 
history of the Republic, the Senate of the United States 
ever possessed a chairman of the Committee on Foreign 
Relations who united in himself in such complete- 
ness the qualifications necessary and desirable for 
the important and delicate duties of that position. 
His qualities were soon put to tlie test. Early in 
the war one of the gallant captains of our navy 
arrested the British mail -steamer " Trent," running 
from one neutral port to another, on the high seas ; 
and took from her, by force, Mason and Slidell, two 
emissaries of the Confederate Government, and their 
despatches. The people of the North loudly ap- 
plauded the act. The secretary of the navy approved 
it. The House of Representatives commended it in 
resolutions. Even in the Senate a majority seemed 
inclined to stand by it. The British Government, in 
a threatening tone, demanded the instant restitution 
of the prisoners, and an apology. The people of the 
North responded with a shout of indignation at Brit- 
ish insolence. The excitement seemed irrepressible. 
It was INIr. Sumner who threw himself into the 
breach, against the violent drift of ]3ublic opinion. 
In a speech in the Senate, no less remarkable for 
patriotic spirit than legal learning, and ingenious and 
irresistible argument, he justified the surrender of 



136 EULOGY or HON. CARL SCHTJEZ. 

the prisoners ; not on the ground, that, during our 
struggle with the Rebellion, we were not in a condi- 
tion to go to war with Great Britain, but on the 
higher ground that the surrender demanded by Great 
Britain, in violation of her own traditional preten- 
sions as to the rights of beUigerents, was in perfect 
accord with American precedent, and the advanced 
principles of our government concerning the rights 
of neutrals. The success of this argument was com- 
plete. It turned the tide of public opinion. It con- 
vinced the American people that this was not an act 
of pusillanimity, but of justice ; not a humiliation of 
the Republic, but a noble vindication of her time- 
honored principles, and a service rendered to the 
cause of progress. 

Other complications followed. The interference 
of European powers in Mexico came. Excited de- 
mands for intervention on our part were made in the 
Senate ; and Mr. Sumner, trusting that the victory 
of the Union over the Rebellion would bring on the 
deliverance of Mexico in its train, with singular 
moderation and tact prevented the agitation of so 
dangerous a policy. Only one of his acts provoked 
comment in foreign countries, calculated to impair 
the high esteem in Avhich his name was universally 
held there. It was his speech on the " Alabama " case, 
preceding the rejection by the Senate of the Claren- 
don-Johnson treaty. I will not deny, that, as to our 
differences with Great Britain, he was not entirely 
free from personal feeling. That the England he 
loved so well — the England of Clarkson and Wil- 



EULOGY OF HON. CARL SCHURZ. 137 

berforce, of Cobden and Bright ; tlie England to 
whom he had looked as the champion of the anti- 
slavery cause in the world — should make such hot 
haste to recognize, nay, as he termed it, to set up 
on the seas as a belligerent, that rebellion, whose 
avowed ol)ject it was to found an empire of slavery, 
and to aid that rebellion by every means short of 
open war against the Union, — that was a shock to 
his feelings which he felt like a betrayal of friendship. 
And yet, while that feeling appeared in the warmth 
of his language, it did not dictate his policy. When, 
finally, the treaty of Washington was negotiated by 
the joint high commission, Mr. Sumner, although 
thinking that more might have been accomplished, 
did not only not oppose that treaty, but actively 
aided in securing for it the consent of the Senate. 
No statesman ever took part in the direction of our 
foreign affairs who so completely identified himself 
with the most advanced, humane, and progressive 
principles. Ever jealous of the honor of his country, 
he sought to elevate that honor by a policy scrupu- 
lously just to the strong, and generous to the weak. 

HIS DEVOTION TO THE GREAT WORK OF HIS LAST 
YEARS. 

I now approach the last period of his life, which 
brought to him new and bitter struggles. The work 
of reconstruction completed, he felt that three ob- 
jects still demanded new efforts. One was that the 
colored race should be protected, by national legisla- 
tion, against degrading discrimination in the enjoy- 

12* 



138 EULOGY OP HON. GAEL SCHTUEZ. 

ment of facilities of education, travel, and pleasure, 
such as stand under the control of law; and this 
object he embodied in his civil-rights bill, of which 
he was the mover and especial champion. The sec- 
ond was, that generous reconciliation should wipe out 
lingering animosities of past conflicts, and re-unite 
in new bonds of brotherhood all those who had been 
divided. And the third was, that the government 
should be restored to the purity and high tone of its 
earliest days, and that from its new birth the Repub- 
lic should issue with a new lustre of moral greatness, 
to lead its children to a higher perfection of man- 
hood, and to be a shining example and beacon-light 
to all the nations of the earth. This accomphshed, 
he often said to his friends he would be content to 
lie down and die. But death overtook him before he 
was thus content ; and before death came he was 
destined to taste more of the bitterness of hfe. His 
civil-rights bill he pressed with unflagging persever- 
ance, against an opposition which stood upon the 
ground that the objects his measure contemplated 
belonged, under the Constitution, to the jurisdiction 
of the States ; that the people, armed with the bal- 
lot, possessed the necessary means to provide for 
their own security ; and that the progressive devel- 
opment of public sentiment would afford to them 
greater protection than could be given by national 
legislation of questionable constitutionality. 



EULOGY OF HON. CARL SCHURZ. 139 

HIS RUPTURE WITH THE ADMINISTRATION, AND 
THE CAUSES THEREFOR. 

The pursuit of other objects brought upon him 
experiences of a painful nature. I have to speak of 
his disagreement with tlie administration of Pres. 
Grant, and with his party. Nothing coukl be far- 
ther from my desire than to re-open, on a solemn 
occasion like this, those bitter conflicts which are 
still so fresh in our minds, and to assail any living 
man in the name of the dead. Were it my purpose 
to attack, I should do so in my own name, and choose 
the place where I can be answered, — not this. But 
I have a duty to perform. It is to set forth, in the 
light of truth, the motives of the dead before the liv- 
ing. I knew Charles Sumner's motives well. "We 
stood together, shoulder to shoulcter, in many a hard 
contest. We Avere friends ; and between us passed 
those confidences which only intimate friendslnp 
knows. Therefore I can truly say that I knew his 
motives well. The civil war had greatly changed 
the country, and left many problems behind it, re- 
quiring again that building, organizing, constructive 
kind of statesmanship which I described as presiding 
over fhe Republic in its earlier history. For a solu- 
tion of many of those problems, Mr. Sumner's mind 
was little fitted; and he naturally turned to those 
which appealed to his moral nature. No great civil 
war has ever passed over any country, especially a 
republic, without producing wide-spread and dan- 
gerous demoralization and corruption, not only in 



140 EULOGY OF HON. CAKL SCHURZ. 

the government, but among the people. In such 
times, the sordid instincts of human nature develop 
themselves to unusual recklessness under the guise 
of patriotism. The ascendancy of no political party 
in a republic has ever been long maintained without 
tempting many of its members to avail themselves, 
for theh selfish advantage, of the opportunities of 
power and party protection, and without attracting 
a horde of camp-followers, professing principle, but 
meaning spoil. It has always been so ; and the 
American Republic has not escaped the experience. 
Neither Mr. Sumner nor many others could, in our 
circumstances, close their eyes to tliis fact. He rec- 
ognized the danger early ; and already, in 1864, he 
introduced in the Senate a bill for the reform of the 
civil service, crude in its detail, but embodying cor- 
rect principles. Thus he may be said to have been 
the earliest pioneer of the civil-service reform move- 
ment. The evil grew under Pres. Johnson's ad- 
ministration ; and ever since it has been cropping 
■ out, not only drawn to light by the efforts of the 
opposition, but, voluntarily and involuntarily, by 
members of the ruhug party itself. There were in 
it many men who confessed to themselves the urgent 
necessity of meeting the growing danger. 

Mr. Sumner could not be silent. He cherished in 
his mind a high ideal of what this Republic and its 
government should be, — a government composed of 
the best and wisest of the land, animated by none 
but the highest and most patriotic aspirations, yield- 
ing to no selfish impulse, noble in its tone and char- 



EULOGY OP HON. GAEL SCHUKZ. 141 

actef, setting its face sternly against all wrong and 
injustice, presenting in its whole being to the Ameri- 
can people a shining example of purity and lofty 
public spirit. Mr. Sumner was proud of his country : 
there was no prouder American in the land. He felt 
in himself the whole dignity of the Republic ; and 
when he saw any thing that lowered the dignity of 
the Republic, and the character of its government, 
he felt it as he would have felt a personal offence. 
He criticised it, he denounced it, remonstrated 
against it ; for he could not do otherwise. He did so 
frequently, and without hesitation and reserve, when 
Mr. Lincoln was president. He continued to do so 
ever since ; the more loudl}^, the more difficult it was 
to make himself heard. It was his nature ; he felt it 
to be his right as a citizen ; he esteemed it his duty 
as a senator. That, and no other, was the motive 
which impelled him. The rupture with the adminis- 
tration was brought on by his opposition to the San- 
to Domingo treaty. In the reasons upon which that 
opposition was based, I know that personal feeling 
had no share. They were patriotic reasons, publicly 
and candidly expressed; and it seems they were ap- 
preciated by a large portion of the American people. 
It has been said that he provoked the resentment of 
the president, by first promising to support that treaty, 
and then opposing it, thus rendering himself guilty 
of an act of duplicity. He has publicly denied the 
justice of the charge, and stated the facts as they 
stood in his memory. I am willing to make the full- 
est allowance for the possibility of a misapprehension. 



142 EULOGY OF HON. CAUL SCHTJEZ. 

of words ; but I affirm also, that no living man who 
knew Mr. Sumner well will hesitate a moment to 
pronounce the charge of duplicity as founded on the 
most radical of misapprehensions. An act of dupli- 
city on his part was simply a moral impossihility. 
It was absolutely foreign to his nature. Whatever 
may have been the defects of his character, he never 
knowingly deceived a human being. There was in 
him not the faintest shadow of dissimulation, disguise, 
or trickery. Not one of his words ever had the pur- 
pose of a double meaning, not one of his acts a hid- 
den aim. His likes and dislikes, his approval and 
disapproval, as soon as they were clear to his own 
consciousness, appeared before the world in the open 
light of noonday. His frankness was so unbounded, 
his candor so entire, his ingenuousness so childlike, 
that he lacked even the discretion of ordinary pru- 
dence. He was almost incapable of moderating his 
feelings, of toning down his meaning in the expres- 
sion. When he might have gained a point by in- 
direction, he would not have done so, because he 
could not. He was one of those, who, when they 
attack, attack always in front, and in broad daylight. 
The night surprise and the flank march were abso- 
lutely foreign to his tactics, because they were in- 
compatible with his nature. I have known many 
men in my life, but never one who was less capable 
of a perfidious act or an artful profession. 

Call him a vain, an impracticable, an imperious 
man, if you will ; but American history does not 
mention the name of one of whom with greater jus- 



EULOGY OP HON. CARL SCHURZ. 143 

tice it can be said that lie was a true man. The 
same candor, and purity of motives, which prompted 
and characterized his opposition to the Santo Do- 
mingo scheme, prompted and characterized the at- 
tacks upon the administration, wliich followeth The 
charges he made, and the arguments with which he 
supported them, I feel not called upon to enumerate. 
Whether and how far they Avere correct or erroneous, 
just or unjust, important or unimportant, the judg- 
ment of history will determine. May that judgment 
be just and fair to us all ! But this I can affirm to- 
day, for I know it : Charle;-^ Sumner never made a 
charge which he did not himself firmlj^ religiously, 
believe to be true ; neither did he condemn those he 
attacked, for any thing he did not firmly, religiously, 
believe to be wrong. And Avhile attacking those in 
power for what he considered wrong, ho was always 
ready to support them in all he considered rigJit. 
After all he has said of the president, he would to- 
day, if he lived, conscientiously, cordially, joyously, 
aid in sustaining the president's recent veto on an 
act of financial legislation which threatened to inflict 
a deep injury on the character, as well as the true 
interests, of the American people. But, at the time 
of which I speak, all he said was so deeply grounded 
in his feeling and conscience, that it was for him dif- 
ficult to understand hoAV others could form different 
conclusions. When, shortly before the national Re- 
publican convention of 1872, he had delivered that 
fierce philippic for which he has lieen censured so 
much, he tuined to me with the question whether I 



144 EULOGY OF HON. CARL SCHUEZ. 

did not think that the statements and arguments he 
had produced would certainly exercise a decisive in- 
fluence on the action of that convention. I replied 
that I thought it would not. He was greatly aston- 
ished. Not as if he indulged in the delusion that 
his personal word would have such authoritative 
weight ; but it seemed impossible to him, that opinions 
which in him had risen to the full strength of over- 
ruling conviction, that a feeling of duty which in 
him had grown so solemn and irresistible as to inspire 
him to any risk and sacrifice, ever so painful, should 
fall powerless at the feet of a party which so long 
had followed inspirations kindred to his own. Such 
was the ingenuousness of his nature, such his faith 
in the rectitude of his own cause. The result of liis 
effort is a matter of history. After the Philadelphia 
Convention, and not until then, he resolved to oppose 
his party, and to join a movement which was doomed 
to defeat. He obe3^ed his sense of right and duty, at 
a terriljle sacrifice. He had been one of the great 
chiefs of his party, by many regarded as the greatest. 
He had stood in the Senate as a mighty monument 
of the struggles and victories of the anti-slavery 
cause. He had been a martyr of his earnestness. 
By all Republicans he had been looked up to with 
respect, by many with veneration. He had been the 
idol of the people of his State. All this was sud- 
denly changed. Already, at the time of his opposi- 
tion to the Santo Domingo scheme, he had been 
deprived of his place at the head of the Senate 
Committee on Foreign Relations, which he had held 



EULOGY OF HON. CAKL SCHTJRZ. 145 

SO long, and witli so mucli honor to the Republic and 
to himself. But few know how sharp a pang it gave 
to his heart, this removal, which he felt as the wan- 
ton degradation of a faithful servant who was con- 
scious of only doing his duty. 

HIS OSTRACISM BY HIS FORMER ADMIRERS. 

But, when he had pronounced against the candi- 
dates of his party, worse experiences were for him in 
store. Journals which for years had been full of his 
praise now assailed him with remorseless ridicule and 
vituperation, questioning his past services, and calling 
him a traitor. Men who had been proud of his ac- 
quaintance turned away their heads when they met 
him in the street. Former flatterers eagerly covered 
his name with slander. Many of those who had been 
his associates in the struggle for freedom sullenly 
withdrew from him their friendship. Even men of 
the colored race, for whose elevation he had labored 
with a fidelity and devotion equalled by few and sur- 
passed by none, joined in the chorus of denunciation. 
Oh, how keenly he felt it ! And as if the cruel mal- 
ice of ingratitude, and the unsparing persecution of 
infuriated partisanship, had not been enough, another 
enemy came upon him, threatening his very life. It 
was a new attack of that disease which for many 
years, from time to time, had prostrated him with the 
acutest suffering, and which shortly should lay him 
low. It admonished him that every word he sj)()kc 
might be his last. He found liimself forced to leave 
the held of a contest in which not only his principles 

13 



146 EULOGY OF HON". CARL SCHUEZ. 

of right, l)iit even his good name, earned by so many 
years of faithful effort, was at stake. He possessed 
no longer the elastic spirit of youth ; and the pros- 
pect of new struggles had ceased to charm him. His 
hair had grown gray with years ; and he had reached 
that age when a statesman begins to love the thought 
of reposing his head upon the pillow of assured pub- 
lic esteem. Even the sweet comfort of that sanctu- 
ary was denied him, in which the voice of wife and 
child would have said, " Rest here ; for, wdiateverthe 
world may say, we know that you are good and 
faitMul and noble." Only the friends of his youth, 
who knew him best, surrounded him with never-flag- 
ging confidence and love, and those of his compan- 
ions-in-arms who knew him also, and who were true 
to him as they were true to their common cause. 
Thus he stood in the presidential campaign of 1872. 
It is at such a moment of bitter ordeal that an hon- 
est public man feels the impulse of retiring within 
himself, to examine Avith scrupulous care the quahty 
of his own motives ; anxiously to inquire whether he 
is really right in his opinions and objects wlicn so 
many old friends say that he is wrong ; and then, 
after such a review at the hand of conscience and 
duty, to form anew his conclusions, without bias, and 
to proclaim them without fear. This he did. He 
had desired, and, as he wrote, he had confidently 
hoped, on returning home from Washington, to meet 
his fellow-citizens in Faneuil Hall, that venerable 
forum, and to si)eak once more on great questions 
involving the welfare of the country ; but recurring 



EULOGY OF HON. GAEL SGHURZ. 147 

symptoms of a painful character warned him against 
such an attempt. The speech he had intended to 
pronounce, but could not, he left in written form for 
pul)Iieation, and went to Europe, seeking rest, un- 
certain whether he would ever return alive. In it 
he reiterated all the reasons which had forced him to 
oppose the administration, and the candidates of his 
party. They were unchanged. Then followed an 
earnest and pathetic plea for universal peace and rec- 
onciliation. He showed how necessary the revival 
of fraternal feeling was, not only for the prosperity 
and physical well-being, but for the moral elevation, 
of the American people, and for the safety and great- 
ness of the Republic. 

ME. SUMNEE's sympathy AND GENEEOSITY 
TOWAEDS THE SOUTH. 

He gave words to his profound sympathy with the 
Southern States in their misfortunes. Indignantly 
he declared, that second only to the wide-spread dev- 
astations of war were the robberies to which those 
States had been subjected under an administration 
calling itself Republican, and with local governments 
deriving their animating impulse from the party in 
power ; and that the people in these communities 
would have been less than men, if, sinking under the 
intolerable burden, they did not turn for help to a 
new party, promising honesty and reform. He re- 
called the reiterated expression he had given to his 
sentiments, ever since the breaking-out of the war, 
and closed the recital witli these words : " Such is 



148 EULOGY OF HON. CARL SCHUEZ. 

tlie simple and harmonious record, showing how from 
the beginning I was devoted to peace ; how constantly 
I longed for reconciliation ; how, with every measure 
of equal rights, this longing found utterance ; how 
it became an essential part of my life; 'how I dis- 
carded all idea of vengeance and punishment ; how 
reconstruction was, to my mind, a transition period ; 
and how earnestly I looked forward to the day when, 
after the recognition of equal rights, the Republic 
should again be one, in reality as in name. If there 
are any who ever maintained a policy of hate, I 
never was so minded ; and now, in protesting against 
any such policy, I act only in obedience to the irre- 
sistible promptings of my soul." 

And well might he speak thus. Let the people of 
the South hear what I say. They were wont to see 
in him only the implacable assailant of that peculiar 
institution which was so closely interwoven with all 
their traditions and habits of life, that they regarded 
it as the very basis of their social and moral exist- 
ence, as the source of their prosperity and greatness ; 
the unsparing enemy of the Rebellion whose success 
was to reahze the fondest dreams of their ambition ; 
the never-resting advocate of the grant of suffrage to 
the blacks, which they thought to be designed for 
their own degradation. Thus they had persuaded 
themselves that Charles Sumner was to them a re- 
lentless foe. They did not know, as others knew, 
that he whom they cursed as their persecutor had a 
heart beating warmly and tenderly for all the human 
kind ; that the efCorls of his hfe were unceasingly 



EFLOGY OF HON. GAEL SCHUEZ. 149 

devoted to those whom he thought most in need of 
aid ; that in the slave he saw only the human soul, 
with its eternal title to the same right and dignity 
which he himself enjoyed; that he assailed the 
slave-master only as the oppressor who denied that 
right ; and that the former oppressor, ceasing to be 
such, and being oppressed himself, could surely count 
upon the fulness of his active sympathy freely given 
in the spirit of equal justice ; that it was the religion 
of his life to protect the weak and oppressed against 
the strong, no matter who were the weak and op- 
pressed, and who were the strong. They knew not, 
that, wliile fiercely combating a wrong, there was not 
in his heart a spark of hatred even for the wrong- 
doer who hated him. They knew not how well he 
deserved the high homage involuntarily paid to him 
by a cartoon during the late presidential campaign, — 
a cartoon, designed to be malicious, which repre- 
sented Charles Sumner strewing flowers on the grave 
of Preston Brooks. They foresaw not, that, to wel- 
come them back to the full brotherhood of the Amer- 
ican people, he would expose himself to a blow, 
wounding him as cruelly as that which years ago 
levelled him to the ground in the Senate-chamber. 
And this new blow he received for them. The peo- 
ple of the South ignored this long. Now that he is 
gone, let them never forget it. 

13* 



150 EULOGY OF HON. CARL SCHUKZ. 

THE BATTLE-FLAG EESOLUTION, AND ITS SIGNIFI- 
CANCE. 

From Europe Mr. Sumner returned late in the fall 
of 1872, much strengthened, but far from being well. 
At the opening of the session he re-introduced two 
measures, which, as he thought, should complete the 
record of his political life. One was his civil-rights 
bill, which had failed in the last Congress ; and the 
other, a resolution providing that the names of battles 
won over fellow-citizens, in the war of the Rebellion, 
should be removed from the regimental colors of the 
army and from the army register. It was, indeed, only 
a repetition of a resolution which he had introduced 
ten years before, in 1862, during the war, when tho 
first names of victories were put on American battle- 
flags. This resolution called forth a new storm 
against him. It was denounced as an insult to the 
heroic soldiers of the Union, and a degradation of 
their victories and well-earned laurels. It was con- 
demned as an unpatriotic act. Charles Sumner in- 
sult the soldiers who had spilled their blood in a war 
for human rights ! Charles Sumner degrade victories 
and dej)reciate laurels won for the cause of universal 
freedom ! How strange an imputation ! 

Let the dead man have a hearing. . This was his 
thought : No civilized nation, from the republics of 
antiquity down to our clays, ever thought it wise or 
patriotic to preserve, in conspicuous and durable form, 
the mementoes of victories won over fellow-citizens 
in civil war. Why not ? Because every citizen 



EULOGY OP HON. CARL SCHUEZ. 151 

shall feel himself, with all others, as the child of a 
common country, and not as a defeated foe. All civ- 
ilized governments of our days have instinctively fol- 
lowed the same dictate of wisdom and patriotism. 
The Irishman, when fighting for Old England at 
Waterloo, was not to behold, on the red cross float- 
ing above him, the name of the Boyne. The Scotch 
Higiilander, when standing in the trenches of Sebas- 
topol, was not, by the colors of his regiment, to be re- 
minded of Culloden. No French soldier at Auster- 
litz or Solferino had to read upon the tri-color any 
reminiscence of the Vendee. No Hungarian at Sa- 
dowa was taunted by any Austrian banner with the 
surrender of Villages. No German regiment from 
Saxony or Hanover, charging under the iron hail of 
Gravel otte, was made to remember, by words written 
on a Prussian standard, that the black eagle had con- 
quered them at Koniggratz and Langensalza. Should 
the son of South Carolina, when at some future day 
defending the Republic against some foreign foe, be 
reminded, by an inscription on the colors floating over 
him, that under this flag the gun was fired that killed 
his father at Gettysburg ? Should this great and en- 
lightened Republic, proud of standing in the front of 
human progress, be less wise, less large-hearted, 
than the ancients were two thousand years ago, and 
the kingly governments of Europe are to-day ? Let 
the battle-flags of the brave volunteers, which they 
brouglit home from the war, with the glorious record 
of their victories, be preserved intact as a proud 
ornament of our State-houses and armories ; but let 



152 EULOGY OF HON. CAUL SCHURZ. 

the colors of the army, mider which the sons of all 
the States are to meet and mingle in common pat- 
riotism, speak of nothing but union ; not a union of 
conquerors and conquered, but a union which is the 
mother of all, equally tender to all, knowing of noth- 
ing but equality, peace, and love among her children. 
Do you want shining mementoes of your victories ? 
They are written upon the dusky brow of every free- 
man who was once a slave ; they are written on the 
gate-posts of a restored Union ; and the most shining 
of all will be written on the faces of a contented peo- 
ple, re-united in common national pride. 

THE MASSACHUSETTS RESOLUTION OF CENSUBE, AND 
ITS RESCINDING. 

Such were the sentiments which inspired that res- 
olution. Such were the sentiments which called 
forth a storm of ol)l(^quy. Such were the sentiments 
for wliich the Legislature of Massachusetts passed a 
solemn resolution of censure upon Charles Sumner, — 
Massachusetts, his own Massachusetts, whom he 
loved so ardently with a filial love, of whom he 
was so proud, who had honored him so much in daj'S 
gone by, and whom he had so long and so faithfully 
labored to serve and to honor ! Oh ! those were evil 
days, that winter, — days sad and dark, when he sat 
there in his lonesome chamber, unable to leave it, the 
world moving around him, and in it so much that 
was hostile ; and he prostrated by the tormenting 
disease, which had returned with fresh violence, 
unable to defend himself,, and with this bitter 



EULOGY OF HON. CARL RCHURZ. 153 

arrow in his heart. AVhy was not that resolution 
held up to scorn and vituperation, as an insult to the 
brave, and an unpatriotic act ? why was he not at- 
tacked and condemned for it, when he first offered it, 
ten years before, and when he was in the fulness of 
manhood and power? If not then, why now? I 
shall never forget the melancholy hours I sat with 
him, seeking to lift him up with cheering words, and 
he — his frame for hours racked with excruciating 
pain, and then exhausted with suffering — gloomily 
brooding over the thought that he might die so. 
How thankful I am, how thankful every human soul 
in Massachusetts, every American, must be, that he 
did not die then ! — and, indeed, more than once, 
death seemed to be knocking at his door, — how 
thankful that he was spared to see the day, when the 
people, by striking developments, were convinced that 
those who had acted as he did had, after all, not been 
impelled by mere whims of vanity, or reckless ambi- 
tion, or sinister designs, but had good and patriotic 
reasons for what they did ; when the heart of Massa- 
chusetts came back to him, full of the old love and 
confidence, assuring him that he would again be her 
chosen son for her representative seat in the house of 
States ; when the lawgivers of the old Common- 
wealth, obeying an irresistible impulse of justice, 
wiped away from the records of the Legislature, and 
fr(jm the fair name of the State, that resolution of 
censure which had stung him so deeply ; and when 
returning vigor lifted him up, and a new sunburst of 
hope illumined his life ! How thankful we all are 
that he lived that one year longer ' 



15-4 EULOGY OF HON. CARL SCHURZ. 

THE LATE SENATOR'S NOBLE LNDEPENDENCE OP 
PARTY. 

And yet (have you thought of it ?) if he had died in 
those dark days, when so many clouds hung over 
him, would not then the much-vilified man have 
been the same Charles Sumner whose death but one 
year later afflicted millions of hearts with a pang of 
l)ereavement, whose praise is now on every lip for 
the purity of his life, for his fidelity to great prin- 
ciples, and for the loftiness of his patriotism ? AVas 
he not a year ago the same, — the same in purpose, the 
same in principle, the same in character? "What had 
he done then that so many who praise him to-day 
should have then disowned him ? See what he had 
done. He had simply been true to his convictions 
of duty. He had approved and urged what he 
thought right : he had attacked and opposed that he 
thought wrong. To his convictions of duty, he had 
sacrificed pohtical associations most dear to him, the 
security of his position, of which he was proud. For 
his convictions of duty, he had stood np against those 
more powerful than he ; he had exposed liimself to 
reproach, obloqu}^ and persecution. Had he not done 
so. he would not have been the man you praise to- 
day ; and yet, for doing so, he was cried down but 
3^esterday. He had lived up to the great word lie 
spoke when he entered the Senate: '' The slave of 
l^rinciple, I call no party master." That declaration 
was greeted with aj-jplause ; and when, true to his 
word, he refused to call a party master, the act was 



EULOGY OF HON. CAKL SCHURZ. 155 

covered with reproach. The spirit impelling him to 
do so was the same conscience which urged him to 
break away from the powerful party which controlled 
his State in the days of Daniel Webster, and to join a 
• feeble minority which stood up for freedom ; to 
throw away the favor, and defy the power, of the 
wealthy and refined, in order to plead the cause of 
the down-trodclen and degraded ; to stand up against 
the slave-power in Congress, with a courage never 
surpassed ; to attack the prejudice of birth and re- 
ligion, and to plead fearlessly for the rights of the 
foreign-born citizen, at a time when the Know-noth- 
ing movement was controlling his State, and might 
liave defeated his own re-election to the Senate ; to 
advocate emancipation, when others trembled with 
fear ; to march ahead of liis followers, when they 
were afraid to follow ; to rise up alone for what he 
thought right, when others would not rise with him. 
It was that brave spirit which does every tiling, 
defies every thing, risks every thing, sacrifices every 
thing, — comfort, society, party, popular support, 
station of honor, prospects, — for sense of right, and 
conviction of duty. That is it for which you honored 
him long, for wliich you reproached him yesterdny, 
and for which you honor him again to-day, and will 
honor him forever. 

Ah, what a lesson is this for the American people ! 
a lesson learned so often, aud, alas ! forgotten almost 
as often as it is learned. Is it well to discourage, to 
proscribe, in your public men, that independent spirit 
which will boldly assert a conscientious sense of duty, 



156 EULOGY OF HON. CAr.L SCHURZ. 

even against tlie behests of power or party ? Is it 
well to teach them that they must serve the com- 
mand and interest of party, even at the price of con- 
science, or they must be crushed under its heel, 
whatever their past service, whatever their ability, 
whatever their character, may be ? Is it well to make 
them beUeve that he who dares to be hhnself must 
be hunted as a political outlaw, who will find justice 
only when he is dead? That would have been the 
sad moral of his death, had Charles Sumner died a 
year ago. Let the American people never forget that 
it has always been the independent spirit, the all- 
defying sense of duty, which broke the way for every 
great progressive movement since mankind has a 
history ; which gave the American Colonies their 
sovereignty, and made this great Republic; wliich 
defied the power of slavery, and made this a republic 
of freemen ; and which — who knows ? — may again 
be needed, some day, to defy the power of ignorance, 
to arrest the inroads of corruption, or to break the 
subtle tyranny of organization, in order to preserve 
this as a Republic. And, therefore, let no man 
understand me as offering what I have said about 
Mr. Sumner's course, during the last period of his 
hfe, as an apology for what he did. He was right 
before his own conscience, and needs no apology. 
Woe to the Republic when it looks in vain for the 
men who seek the truth without prejudice, and speak 
the truth without fear, as they understand it, no 
matter whether the world he willing to listen, or not ! 
Alas for the generation that would put such men 



EULOGY OF nON. CARL SCHITIIZ. loT 

into their graves with the poor boon of an apology 
for what was in them noblest and best ! Who 
will not agree, that had power or partisan spirit, 
which persecuted him because he followed higher 
aims than party interest, ever succeeded in subjugat- 
ing and moulding him after its fashion, against his 
conscience, against his conviction of duty and sense 
of right, he would have sunk into his grave a misera- 
ble ruin of his great self, wrecked in his moral nature, 
deserving only a tear of pity ? For he was great and 
useful only because he dared to be himself all the 
days of his life ; and for this you have, when he 
died, put the laurel upon his brow. 

THE GREAT SENATOR'S POSITION" EST HISTORY. 

From the coffin which hides his body, Charles 
Sumner, now rises up before our eyes an historic 
character. Let us look at hun once more. His life 
lies before us like an open book which contains no 
double meanings, no crooked passages, no mysteries, 
no concealments. It is clear as crystal. Even his 
warmest friend will not see in it the model of perfect 
statesmanship, nor that eagle glance, which, from a 
lofty eminence, at one sweep surveys the whole field 
on which, by labor, thought, strife, accommodation, 
impulse, restraint, slow and rapid movement, the 
destinies of a nation are worked out ; not that ever 
calm and steady and self-controlling good sense, 
which judges existing things just as they are, cor- 
rectly estimates comparative good and comparative 
evil, and impels or restrains, as that estimate may 

14 



158 EULOGY OF HOX. CARL SCHURZ. 

command. Mr. Sumner's natural abilities were not 
of the first order ; but they were supplemented by 
acquired abilities of remarkable power. When he 
desired to originate a measure of legislation, he 
scarcely ever elaljorated its practical detail : he usually 
threw his idea into the form of a resolution, or a bill, 
giving in the main his purpose only ; and then he 
advanced to the discussion of the principles involved. 
He not only thought, but he did not hesitate to say, 
that all construction of the Constitution must be 
subservient to the supreme duty of giving the amplest 
protection to the natural rights of man, by direct na- 
tional legislation. He had studied economical sub- 
jects more than is commonly supposed. It was one 
of his last regrets that his health did not permit him 
to make a speech in favor of an early resumption of 
specie payments. On matters of international law, 
and foreign affairs, he was the recognized authority 
of the Senate. But some of his very shortcomings 
served to increase that peculiar power which he 
exerted in his time. His public life was thrown into 
a period of a rcA'olutionar}^ character, when one great 
end was the self-imposed subject of a universal strug- 
gle, — a struggle which was not made, not manu- 
factured b}^ the design of men, but had grown from 
the natural conflict of existing things, and grew irre- 
sistibly, on and on, until it enveloi:)ed all the thought 
of the nation ; and that one great end ai)pcaling, more 
than to the practical sense, to the moral impulses of 
men, making of them the fighting force. Thus keep- 
ing the end steadily, obstinately, intensely, in view. 



EtJLOGY OF HON. GAEL SCHURZ. 159 

he marclied ahead of his followers, never disturbed 
.by their anxieties and fears, showing them that what 
was necessary was possible, and forcing them to fol- 
low him, — a great moving power, such as the strug- 
gle required. " Had he lived before or after this great 
period, in quiet, ordinary times, he would, perhaps, 
never have risen in public life to conspicuous signifi- 
cance. But all he was by nature, by acquirement, 
by ability, by moral impulse, made him one of the 
heroes of that great struggle against slavery, and in 
some respects the first. What a peculiar power of 
fascination there was in him as a public man ! It 
acted much through his eloquence, but not through 
his eloquence alone. His arguments marched forth at 
once in grave and stately array ; his sentences, like 
rows of massive Doric columns, unrelieved by pleas- 
ing variety, severe and imposing. His orations, 
especially those pronounced in the Senate before the 
war, contain many passages of grand beauty. His 
appeals were always addressed to the noblest instincts 
of human nature. His speech was never enlivened 
by any thing like wit or humor. His weapon was not 
the foil, but the battle-axe. Not seldom he appeared 
overbearing in his assumptions of authority ; but it 
was the imperiousness ef profound conviction, which, 
while sometimes exasperating his hearers, yet 
scarcely ever failed to exercise over them a certain 
sway. In his later years his vast learning began to 
become an encumbering burden to his eloquence. 
The mass of quoted sayings and historical illustra- 
tions not seldom accumulated beyond measure, and, 



160 EULOGY OF HON. CARL SCHURZ. 

grotesquely grouped, sometimes threatened to suffo- 
cate all original thought, and to oppress the hearer.. 
But there were always moments when he recalled to 
our mind the clays of his freshest vigor, standing in 
the midst of the great struggle, lifting up the youth 
of the country with heart-stirring appeals, and with 
the lion-like thunder of his voice shaking the Senate- 
chamber. 

MR. SU]VINEE,'S PHYSICAL AND PERSONAL CHARAC- 
TERISTICS. 

Still there was another source from which that 
fascination sprung. Behind all he said and did 
there stood a grand manhood which never failed to 
make itself felt. What a figure he was, with his tall 
and stalwart frame, his manly face, topped with his 
shaggy locks, his noble bearing ! — the finest type of 
American senatorship, the tallest oak of the forest. 
How he stood among the mere politicians ! — he whose 
very presence made you forget the vulgarities of 
political life ; who dared to differ with any man 
ever so powerful, any multitude ever so numer- 
ous ; who regarded party as nothing but a means 
for higher ends, and for those ends defied its 
power ; to whom the arts of demagogism were so 
contemptible, that he would rather have sunk into 
obscurity and oblivion than descend to them ; to 
whom the dignity of his office was so sacred, that he 
would not even ask for it, for fear of darkening its 
lustre. 

Honor to the people of Massachusetts, who for 



EULOGY OF HON. GAEL SCHTJEZ. IHl 

tTventj-thrce years kept in the Senate, and would 
have kept him there ever so long, had he lived, — a 
man who never, even to them, conceded a single 
iota of his convictions in order to remain there ! And 
what a life was his ! — a life so wholly devoted to 
what was good and noble ! There he stood, in the 
midst of the grasping materiahsm of our times, around 
him the eager chase for the almighty dollar, no 
thought of opportunity ever entering the smallest 
corner of his mind, and disturbing his high endeav- 
ors ; with a virtue which the possession of power 
could not even tempt, much less debauch; from 
whose presence the very thought of corruption in- 
stinctively shrank back; a life so unspotted, an 
integrity so intact, a character so high, that the most 
daring eagerness of calumny, the most wanton au- 
dacity of insinuation, standing on tiptoe, could not 
touch the soles of his shoes. They say that he 
indulged in overweening self-appreciation. Ay : he 
did have a magnificent pride, a lofty self-esteem. 
Why should he not? Let wretches despise them- 
selves, for they have good reason to do so : not he. 
He was the proudest American ; he was the proudest 
New Englander : and yet he was the most cosmo- 
politan American I have ever seen. There was in 
him not the faintest shadow of that narrow prejudice 
which looks askance of what has grown in foreign 
lands. His generous heart and his enlightened mind 
were too generous and too enlightened not to give 
the fullest measure of apx~)reciation to all that was 
good and worthy, from whatever quarter of the globe 

14* 



162 EULOGY OF HON. CAr.L SCHTJEZ. 

it came. And, noAv, liis home ! There are those 
around me who have breathed the air of his house in 
Washington, — that atmosphere of refinement, schol- 
arship, art, friendship, and warm-hearted hospitality ; 
they have seen those rooms covered and filled with 
his pictures, his engravings, his statues, his bronzes, 
his books and rare manuscripts, — the collections 
of a lifetime, — the image of the richness of his 
mind, the comfort and consolation of his solitude. 
They rememlier his craving for friendship, as it 
spoke through the far-outstretched hand when j^ou 
arrived, and the glad exclamation, " I am so happy 
you came ! " and the beseeching, almost despond- 
ent tone when you departed, " Do not leave me 
yet ; do stay a while longer :• I want so much to speak 
with you ! " It is all gone now. 

THE CLOSE OF THE GREAT SENATOR'S LIFE, AND 
ITS LESSON. 

Now we have laid him into Ms grave, in the moth- 
erly soil of Massachusetts, which was so dear to him. 
He is at rest now, the stalwart, brave old champion, 
whose face and bearing were so austere, and whose 
heart was so full of tenderness ; who began his 
career with a pathetic plea for universal peace and 
charity ; and whose whole life was an arduous, inces- 
sant, never-resting struggle, which left him all cov- 
ered with scars. And we can do nothing for him, 
but remember his loft}^ ideals of hberty and equal- 
ity and justice and reconciliation and purity, and 
the earnestness and courage and touchmg fidelity 



EULOGY OF HON. GAEL SCFIURZ. 163 

with which he fought for them ; so genuine in his 
sincerity, so single-minded in his zeal, so heroic in 
his devotion ! Oh that we coukl, but for one short 
hour, call him up from his coffin, to let him see with 
the same eyes which saw so much hostility, that those 
who stood against him in the struggles of his life are 
his enemies no longer ! We would . show him the 
fruit of the conflicts and sufferings of his last three 
years, and that he had not struggled and suffered in 
vain. We would bring before him not only those 
who from offended partisan zeal assailed him, and 
who now with sorrowful hearts praise the purity 
of his patriotism ; but we would bring to him that 
man of the South, a slaveholder, and a leader of 
secession in his time, the echo of whose words, spoken 
in the halls of the Capitol, we heard but yesterday, — 
words of respect, of gratitude, of tenderness. That 
man of the South should then do what he deplored 
not to have done while he lived : he should lay his 
hand upon the shoulders of the old friend of the 
human kind, and say to him, " Is it you whom I 
hated, and who, as I thought, hated me ? I have 
learned now the greatness and magnanimity of your 
soul ; and here I offer you my hand and heart." 
Could he but see this with those e3'es, so weary 
of contention and strife, how contentedly would he 
close them again, having beheld the greatness of his 
victories ! 

People of Massachusetts ! he was the son of your 
soil, in which he now sleeps ; but he is not all your 
own. lie belongs to all of us in the North and in 



164 EULOGY OF HON. CARL SCHURZ. 

the Soutli ; to the Llacks he helped to make free, and 
to the whites he strove to make brothers again. Let, 
on the grave of him whom so many thought to be 
their enemy and found to be their friend, the hands 
be clasped wliich so bitterly warred against^ each 
other. Let upon the grave the youth of America be 
taught, by the story of his life, that not only genius, 
power, and success, but, more than these, patriotic 
devotion, and vii-tue, make the greatness of the citi- 
zen. If this lesson be understood, more than Charles 
Sumner's living Avord could have done for the gloiy 
of America will be done by the inspiration of his 
great example ; and it will truly be said, that al- 
though his body lies mouldering in the earth, yet m 
the assured rights of all, in the brotherhood of a 
re-united people, and in a purified Republic, he still 
lives, and will live forever. 



EULOGY BY GEOEGE WILLIAM CUETIS. 



THE TRIBUTE OF THE STATE AUTHORITIES. 



THE SERVICES m MUSIC HALL, JUNE 9. —PRAYER BY JAMES 
FREEMAX CLARKE. — A POEM EY WUITTIER. — SINGING BY 
CLARA LOUISE KELLOGG AND ADELAIDE PHILLIPPS. — IN- 
TRODUCTION BY ALEXANDER H. BULLOCK. 

The services began at a few minutes past one 
o'clock, with a voluntary on the organ by Dudley 
Buck. The Temple Quartette then chanted, amid 
an impressive si'.ence, Rhodes's setting of the follow- 
ing-words: — 

Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth, while 
the evil days come not, nor the years draw nigh, when thou 
shalt say, I have no pleasure in them; 

While the sim, or the light, or the moon, or the stars, be not 
darkened, nor the clouds return after the rain : 

lu the day when the keepers of the house shall tremble, and 
the strong men shall bow tliemselves, and the grinders cease 
because they are few, and those that look out of the windows 
be darkened. 

And the doors shall be shut in the streets, when the sound of 
the grinding is low, and he shall rise up at the voice of the bird, 
and all the daughters of music shall be brought low ; 

165 



166 EULOGY BY GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

Also when they shall be afraid of that vliich is hi^h, and 
fears shall be in the way, and the almond-tree shall flourish, and 
the gi-asshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail: because 
man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go about the 

streets : 

Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be 
broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountam, or the wheel 
broken at the cistern. 

Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the 
spirit shall return unto God who gave it. 

The Rev. Dr. James Freeman Clarke then made 
an eloquent prayer ; in which he invoked the divine 
aid in turning the thoughts of men, from the shallow 
triumphs of party, to working for the good of the 
entire nation. Miss Clara Louise Kellogg then sang, 
" I know that my Redeemer liveth ; " after which 
Prof. J. W. Churchill read the foUowing poem by 
Whittier : — 

SUMNER. 

"I anj not one who has dist^-aced beauty of sentiment l\v de- 
fonuity of conduct, or the maxims of a freeman by the actions of a 
slave; but, by the grace of God, I have kept my life unsullied." — 
Miltok's Defence of the People of England. 

O Mother State ! the winds of March 
Blew chill o'er Auburn's Field of God," 

Where, slow, beneath a leaden arch 
Of sky, thy momning children trod. 

And now, with all thy woods in leaf, 
Thy fields in flower, beside thy dead 

Thou sittest, in thy robes of grief, 
A Kachel yet uncomi'orted ! 



EULOGY BY GEORGE WILLIAIM CURTIS. 167 

And once again the organ swells ; 

Once more the flag is half-way hung; 
And yet again the mournful bells 

In aU thy steeple-towers are rung. 

And I, obedient to thy will, 

Have come a simple wreath to lay, 
Superfluous, oil a grave that still 

Is sweet with all the flowers of May. 

I take, with awe, the task assigned: 

It may be that my friend might miss, 
In his new sphere of heart and mind, 

Some token from my hand in this. 

By many a tender memory moved, 

Along the past my thought I send; 
The record of the cause he loved 

Is the best record of its friend. 

AVliat hath been said, I caii but say: 
All know the work that brave man did ; 

For he was open as the day. 
And nothing of himself he hid. 

No trumpet sounded in his ear, 

lie saw not Sinai's cloud and flame; 
But never yet to Hebrew seer 

A clearer voice of duty came. 

God said, " Break thou these yokes; undo 

These heavy burdens. I ordain 
A work to last thy whole life through, — 

A ministry of strife and pain. 

" Forego thy dreams of lettered ease. 

Put thou the scholar's promise by : 
The rights of man are more than these." 

He heard, and answered, " Here am I." 



168 EULOGY BY GEOEGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

■ He set his face against the blast, 
His feet against the flinty shard, 
Till the hard service grew, at last, 
Its own exceeding great reward. 

The fixed star of his faith, through all 
Loss, doubt, and peril, shone the same, 

As, through a night of storm, some tall. 
Strong lighthouse lifts its steady flame. 

Beyond the dust and smoke, he saw 

The sheaves of freedom's large increase, 

The holy fanes of equal law. 
The New Jerusalem of peace. 

No wail was in his voice; none heard, 

When treason's storm-cloud blackest grew, 

The wealoiess of a doubtful word: 
His duty, and the end, he knew. 

The first to smite, the first to spare; 

'When once the hostile ensigns fell, 
He stretched out hands of generous care 

To lift the foe he fought so well. 

For there was nothing base or small. 
Or craven, in his soul's broad plan: 

Forgiving all things personal, 
He hated only wrong to man. 

The old traditions of his State, 

The memories of her great and good, 

Took from his life a fresher date. 
And in himself embodied stood. 

How felt the greed of gold and place. 

The venal crew that schemed and planned, 

The fine scorn of that haughty face. 
The spurning of that bribuless hand! 



ETJT.OGY BY GEORGE WILLIAM CUETIS. 169 

If than Rome's tribunes statelier 

He wore his senatorial robe, 
His lofty port was all for her, 

The one dear spot on all the globe. 

If to the master's plea he gave 

The vast contempt his manhood felt, 
He saw a brother in the slave ; 

With man as equal man he dealt. 

Proud was he ? If his presence kept 

Its grandeur wheresoe'er he trod, 
As if from Plutarch's gallery stepped 

The hero and the demi-god, 

None failed, at least, to reach his ear; 

Nor want nor woe appealed in vain; 
The homesick soldier knew his cheer, 

And blessed him from his ward of pain. 

Safely his dearest friends may own 

The slight defects he never hid, — 
The surface-blemish in the stone 

Of the tall, stately pyramid. 

Suffice it .that he never brought 

His conscience to the public mart ; 
But lived himself the truth he taught, 

White-souled, clean-handed, pure of heart. 

What if he felt the natural pride 

Of power in noble use, too true 
With thin humilities to hide 

The work he did, the lore he knew? 

Was he not just? Was any wronged 

By that assured self-estimate ? 
He took but what to him belonged, 

Unenvious of another's state. 

15 



170 EULOGY BY GEOEGE WILLIAM CUETIS. 

"Well might he heed the words he spake, 
And scan with care the written page 

Through which he still shall warm and wake 
The hearts of men from age to age. 

Ah! who shall blame him now because 
He solaced thus his hours of pain ? 

Should not the o'erworn thresher pause, 
And hold to light his golden grain ? 

No sense of humor dropped its oil 
On the hard ways his purpose went ; 

Small play of fancy lightened toil ; 
He spake alone the thing he meant. 

He loved his books, the art that hints 
A beauty veiled behind its own, 

The graver's line, the pencil's tints. 
The chisel's shape evoked from stone. 

He cherished, void of selfish ends, 
The social courtesies that bless 

And sweeten life, and loved his friends 
With most unworldly tenderness. 

But still his tired eyes rarely learned 
The glad relief by Nature brought; 

Her mountain ranges never turned 
His current of persistent thought. 

The sea rolled chorus to his speech ; 

The pine-grove whispered of his theme ; 
Where'er he wandered, rock and beach 

Were Forum and the Academe. 

The sensuous joy from all things fair 
His strenuous bent of soul repressed, 

And left, from youth to silvered hair. 
Few hom-s for pleasure, none for rest. 



EULOGY BY GEORGE WILLTAM CUETIS. 171 

For all his life was poor without : 

O Nature, make the last amends! 
Train all thy flowers his grave about, 

And make thy singing-birds his friends. 

Revive again, thou summer rain, 

The broken turf upon his bed ! 
Breathe, summer wind, thy tenderest strain 

Of low, sweet music overhead I 

Nor cant nor poor solicitudes 

Made weak in life's great argument ; 
Small leisure his for frames and moods, 

Who followed Duty where she went. 

The broad, fair fields of Cod he saw 

Beyond the bigot's narrow bound ; 
The truths he moulded into law 

In Christ's beatitudes he found. 

His state-craft was the Golden Rule, 

Ilis right of vote a sacred trust : 
Cleai", over threat and ridicule, 

All heard his challenge : " Is it just ? " 

And, when the hour supreme had come. 

Not for himself a thought he gave : 
In that last pang of martyrdom, 

His care was for the half-freed slave. 

Not vainly dusky hands upbore, 

In prayer, the passing soul to heaven. 
Whose mercy to the suffering poor 

Was service to the Master given. 

Long shall the good State's annals tell, 
Her children's children long be taught, 

How, praised or blamed, he guarded well 
The trust he neither shunned nor sought. 



172 EULOGY BY GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

If for one moment turned thy face, 

O Mother, from thy son, not long * 

He waited calmly in his place 

The sure remorse which follows wrong. 

Forgiven be the State he loved 

The one brief lapse, the single blot ; 
Forgotten be the stain removed : 

Her righted record shows it not. • 

The lifted sword above her shield 

With jealous care still guard his fame: 

The pine-tree on her ancient field 

To all the winds shall speak his name. 

The marble image of her son 

Her loving hands shall yearly crown, 

And from her pictured Pantheon 
His grand, majestic face look down. 

O State so passing rich before ! 

Who now shall doubt thy highest claim ? 
The world that counts thy jewels o'er 

Shall longest pause at Sumner's name. 

INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS OF EX-GOVERNOR 
BULLOCK. 

After Miss Adelaide Phillips had sung Mendel- 
ssohn's " O rest in the Lord," ex-Governor Bullock 
made the following introductory address : — 

In the train of those paying mournful tribute to 
Charles Sumner, most fit is the presence of the Legis- 
lature of Massachusetts. By their act, twenty-four 
years ago, the gate was opened through which he 
passed to the Senate of the United States for life. 






EULOGY BY GEORGE WILLIAM CUKTIS. 173 

And now, after tliis lapse of time, and the close of 
his career, the o^overnment and the people of this 
Commonwealth contemplate with a just and solemn 
satisfaction the contribution they then made to the 
higher sphere of statesmanship. They recall his first 
appearance there, seemingly lost amidst a majority 
who were the embodiment and type of ideals so much 
less heroic and elevated than his own ; with what 
masterly unreserve he began and continued liis great 
mission, abating nothing, disguising nothing, sweep- 
ing in his perspective many of the vast results which 
have since been attained ; how he lived to see his 
grand central aspiration realized, his main purposes 
accomplished, at his death leaving as a truth never 
before so well illustrated at the Capitol, — that the 
character of statesman and senator derives added 
strength and lustre from the character of scholar and 
philanthropist, liberator and reformer. At the mo- 
ment of the greatest triumph of Wilberforce, on the 
j)assage of his bill abolishing the slave-trade, Sir 
Samuel Romilly, amid the ringing acclamations of the 
House of Commons, called upon the younger members 
to observe how superior were the rewards of virtue 
to all the vulgar conceptions of ambition. In the 
hour of the greatest triumph of Sumner, — the hour 
of his death, — a like admonition arose from his va- 
cant chair, calling upon American public life to mark 
the lofty exemplar, by whom, amid abounding cor- 
ruption, comparative poverty had been held as honor ; 
to whom artifice and intrigue had been an abhor- 
rence ; who, in the long practice of official transac- 

15* 



174 EULOGY BY GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

tions and official manners, had never acquired an offi- 
cial heart ; who had guarded his conscience against 
every assault, and always kept that vessel pure ; 
upon whose headstone the whole Republic inscribes, 
for its souvenance, incoeruptible and unap- 
proachable. With one mind the senators and rep- 
resentatives of Massachusetts, successors to those 
who nearly a quarter of a century since sent him 
forth with the seal of his great commission, are pres- 
ent, by these final and august ceremonies, to deliver 
him over to history. In selecting their orator for 
this tender office, they could not fail to call for him 
who best would give voice to their eulogy. As our 
lamented senator was a master in all the art of liter- 
ature, it is fitting that he should be embalmed by the 
art of another and similar master and personal friend. 
I introduce to you Mr. George William Curtis. 

MR. CURTIS'S ADDRESS. 

Mr. Curtis was warmly greeted. He spoke as fol- 
lows : — 

The prayer is said ; the dirge is sung ; from the 
waters of the bay to the hills of Berkshire the funeral 
bells of the Commonwealth have tolled ; the Congress 
of the United States, of which he was the oldest 
member in continuous service, has in both houses 
spoken his praises, — no voice more eloquent than 
that of his opponents ; the race to whose elevation 
his life was consecrated has bewailed him with filial 
gratitude ; this city, his birthplace and his home, has 
proudly mourned its illustrious citizen; the pulpit 



EULOGY BY GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 175 

and tbe press everywliere in the land have blended 
sorrow and admiration. And now his native State, 
with all its honored magistracy, — the State which 
gave him his great opportunity, clothing his words 
with the majesty of Massachusetts, so that when he 
spoke it was not the voice of a man, but of a Com- 
monwealth ; lamenting a son so beloved, a servant so 
faithful, a friend so true, — comes last of all to say 
farewell, and to deliver the character and career of 
Charles Sumner to history, and the judgment of man- 
kind. I know how amply, how eloquently, how 
tenderly, the story of his life has been told. In this 
place you heard it in words that spoke for the culture 
and the conscience of the country, for the prosper- 
ous and happy. And yonder in Faneuil Hall his 
eulogy fell from lips that must always glow when 
they mention him, — lips that sjDoke for the most 
wronged and most unfortunate in the land, who never 
saw the face of Sumner, but whose children's children 
will bless his name forever. I might well hesitate to 
stand here if I did not know, that, enriched by your 
sympathy, my words, telling the same tale, will seem 
to your generous hearts to prolong for a moment the 
requiem that you would not willingly let die. 

Nor think the threefold strain superfluous. How 
well this universal eulogy — these mingling voices of 
various nativity, but all American' — befits a man 
whose aims and efforts were universal ; whom, neither 
a city, nor a State, nor a party, nor a nation, nor a 
race, bound with any local limitation ! On a lofty 
hill overlooking the Lake of Cayuga, in New York, 



176 EULOGY BY GEORGE WILLIAM CUKTIS. 

stands a noble tree, in the grounds of the Cornell 
University, under which an Oxford scholar, choosing 
America for his home, because America is the home 
of liberty, has placed a seat upon which he has. carved, 
" Above all nations is humanity." That is the le- 
gend which Charles Sumner carved upon his heart, 
and sought to write upon the hearts of his fellow-citi- 
zens and of the world. And if at this moment my 
voice should suddenly sink into silence, I can believe 
that this hall would thrill and murmur with the last 
words he ever pubUcly spoke in Massachusetts, stand- 
ing on this very spot : " Nor would I have my coun- 
try forget, at any time, in the discharge of its trans- 
cendent duties, that, since the rule of conduct and of 
honor is the same for nations as for individuals, the 
greatest nation is that which does most for humanity." 

THE INFLUENCES THAT MADE THE MAN. 

Amidst the general sorrow Massachusetts mourns 
Mm by the highest right ; for with all the grasp of his 
hope, and his cosmopolitan genius, perhaps for those 
very reasons, he was essentially a Massachusetts man. 
And here I touch the first great influence that 
moulded your senator. This is the Puritan State ; 
and the greatness of Sumner was the greatness of the 
Puritan genius, — the greatness of moral power. 
Learning and culture and accomplishment, testhetic 
taste and knowledge, the grace of society, the schol- 
ar's rich resource in travel, illustrious friendships 
in every land, tlie urbanity and charm of a citizen 
of the world, — all these he had ; all these you know : 



EULOGY BY GEOEGE WILLIAM CUETIS. 177 

yet all these were but the velvet in which the iron 
Puritan hand was clad, — the Puritan hand which in 
other days had smitten kings and dynasties hip and 
thigh ; had saved civil and religious hberty in Eng- 
land ; had swept the Mediterranean of pirates ; had 
avenged the Lord's 

" Slaughtered saints, whose bones 
Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold; " 

the Puritan hand which, reaching out across the sea, 
sterner than the icy sternness of the New-England 
shore, grasped a new continent, and wrought the 
amazing miracle of America. 

The Puritan spirit in the larger sense, enriched 
with many nationalities, broader, more generous, 
more humane, is the master influence of American 
civilization ; and among all our public men it has no 
type so satisfactory and complete as Charles Sumner. 
He was the son of Massachusetts. By the fruit let 
the tree be judged. The State to whose hard coast 
"The Mayflower " came, and upon whose rocks it 
dropped its seed ; the State in which the mingled 
Puritan and Pilgrim spirit has been most active, — is 
to-day the chief of Commonwealths. It is the com- 
mimity in which the average of well-being is higher 
than in any State we know in history. Puritan in 
origin though it be, it is more truly liberal and fi-ee 
than any similar community in the world. The fig 
and the pomegranate and the almond will not grow 
there, nor the nightingale sing ; but nobler blossoms 
of the old human stock than its most famous children 



178 EULOGY BY GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

tlie sun never shone upon ; nor lias the liberty-loving 
heart of man heard sweeter music than the voices of 
James Otis and Samuel Adams, of John Adams and 
Joseph Warren, of Josiah Quincy and Charles Sum- 
ner. Surely I may say so, born in the State that 
Roger Williams founded, — Roger Williams, the 
prophet whom Massachusetts stoned. 

Into this State and these influences Charles Sum- 
ner was born sixty-three years ago, while as yet the 
traditions of colonial New England were virtually 
unchanged. Here were the town-meeting, the con- 
stable, the common school, the training-day, the 
general intelligence, the morality, the habit of self- 
government, the homogeneity of population, the 
ample territory, the universal instinct of law. Here 
was the full daily practice of what De Tocqueville 
afterward called the two or three principal ideas 
which form the basis of the social theory of the United 
States, and which seemed to make a republic possible, 
practicable, and wise. It was one of the good fortunes 
of Sumner's life, that, born amidst these influences, 
he used to the utmost the advantage of school and 
college. To many men youth itself is so sweet a 
siren, that, in hearing her song, they forget all but the 
pleasure of listening to it. But the Sibyl saved no 
scroll from Sumner: he had the wisdom to seize 
them all. His classmates, gayly returning late at 
night, saw the studious light shining in his window. 
The boy was hard at work already, in those plastic 
years, storing his mind and memory, which seemed 
indeed an " inabihty to forget," with the literature 



EULOGY BY GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 179 

and historic lore which gave his hiter discourse such 
amplitude and splendor of illustration, that, like a 
royal robe, it was stiff and cumbrous and awkward 
with exaggerated richness of embroidery. He never 
lost this vast capacity of work ; and his life had no 
idle hours. Long afterward, when he was in Paris, 
recovering from the blow in the Senate, ordered not to 
think or read, and daily, as the physician lately tells 
us, undergoing a torture of treatment which he re- 
fused to mitigate by anassthetics, simply unable to do 
nothing, he devoted himself to the study and col- 
lection of engravings, in which he became an expert. 
And I remember, in the midsummer of 1871, when 
he remained, as was his custom, in Washington, after 
the city was deserted by all but its local population, 
and Avhen I saw him daily, that he rose at seven in 
the morning, and, with but a slight breakfast at nine, 
sat at his desk in the library hard at work until five in 
the afternoon. It was his vacation ; the weather was 
tropical ; and he was sixty years old. The renowned 
senator at his post was still the solitary midnight 
student of the college. 

But other influences mingled in his education, 
and helped to mould the man. While his heart 
burned with the tale of Plutarch's heroes, with the 
story of ancient states, and the politics of Greece 
and Rome and modern Europe, he lived in this liistoric 
city, and was therefore familiar with many of the 
most inspiring scenes of our American story. I know 
not if the people of this neighborhood are always 
conscious of the hallowed ground upon which they 



180 EULOGY BY GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

daily tread. We who come hither from other States, 
pilgrims to the cradle of American independence, are 
moved by emotions such as we cannot elsewhere feel. 
Here is the " Old South " meeting-house, — and here 
may it long remain ! — where, however changed, 
still in imagination Sam Adams calls the sons of lib- 
erty to their duty. There is the Old State-house, 
where James Otis, with electric eloquence, brings a 
continent to its feet. Beneath is the ground where 
Crispus Attuclvs fell. Beyond is Faneuil Hall, the 
plainest and most reverend political temple now 
standing in the world ; and upon the principles which 
are its inseparable traditions has been founded the 
most humane republic in history. There is the Old 
North steej^le, on which Paul Revere's lantern lights 
the land to independence. Below is the water on 
which the scarlet troops of Percy and of Howe ghtter 
in the June sunshine of ninety-nine years ago ; and 
lo ! memorial of a battle lost and a cause won, the 
tall, gray, melancholy shaft on Bunker Hill rises 
" till it meets the sun in its coming, while the earliest 
light of morning gilds it, and parting day lingers and 
plays on its summit." 

These scenes, as well as his books and college, 
were the school of Sumner; and as the tall and 
awkward youth, dreaming of Marathon and Arbela, 
of Sempace and Morgarten, walked on Bunker Hill, 
and liis eyes wandered, over peaceful fields and happy 
towns, to Concord and Lexington, doubt not that the 
genius of his native land whispered to him that all 
knowledge, and the highest training, and the purest 

16 



EULOGY BY GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 181 

purpose, were but the necessary equipment of the 
ambition that would serve in any way a country 
whose cause, in his own day as in the day of Bunker 
Hill, was the cause of human nature. Charles Sum- 
ner was an educated man, a college-bred man, as 
all the great revolutionary leaders of Massachusetts 
were ; and he knew, as every intelligent man knows, 
that from the day when Themistocles led the educated 
Athenians at Salamis, to that when Von Moltke mar- 
shalled the educated Germans against France, the 
sure foundations of states are laid in knowledge, not 
in ignorance ; and that every sneer at education, at 
cultivation, at book-learning, which is the recorded 
wisdom of the experience of manldnd, is the dema- 
gogue's sneer at intelligent liberty, inviting national 
degeneration and ruin. 

Sumner was soon, at the Law School, the favorite 
pupil of that accomplished magistrate Judge Story, 
the right-hand of Marshall, to whom in difficult mo- 
ments the great Webster turned for law. But the 
character of his legal studies, when, a little later, he 
was lecturing at the Law School, — for he spoke chiefly 
of constitutional law and the law of nations, — showed 
even then the bent of his feeling, the vague reaching- 
out toward the future, the first faint hints and fore- 
shadowings of his own ultimate career. Could it have 
been revealed to him, in that modest lecture-room at 
Cambridge, as he was unfolding to a few students the 
principles of international law, which in its full glory 
he believed to be nothing less than the science of the 
moral relations of states to each other, that one day. 



182 EULOGY BY GEORGE WILLIAM CUETIS. 

in the Senate of the United States, and in its chief 
and most honorable phace, he should plead for the 
practical application of the principles which he 
cherished, a recognized authority, and himself one 
of the lawgivers whom he had described as the re- 
formers of nations, and the builders of human society ; 
how well might he have seen that culmination of his 
career as the most secret hope of his heart fulfilled ! 
But again, as he stood there, could he have seen, as 
in a vision, that one day also he should stand in that 
senatorial arena in deadly conflict with crime against 
humanity, — a conflict that shook the continent, and 
arrested the world, — and as a general upon a battle- 
field marshals all his forces, holding his swift and 
glittering lines in hand, his squadrons and regiments 
and artillery, his skirmishers and reserves, massing 
and dispersing at his supreme will, and at last, snatch- 
ing all his force, hurls it at the foe in one blasting 
bolt of fire and victory, so he, in that other and 
greater field, should gather up all the accumulated 
resources of his learning, all the training of the law, 
all the deep instincts and convictions of his con- 
science, and hurl them, in one blazing and resistless 
mass, in the very forefront of that mighty debate that 
flamed into civil war, melting four millions of chains, 
and regenerating a nation, — could all this have been 
revealed to him, I doubt if he could have prepared 
himself for the great part that he was to play with 
more conscience or more care. 

Then to the influences that made the man was 
added a residence in Europe. He returned a pol- 



EULOGY BY GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 183 

ished cosmopolitan ; a learned youth who had sat 
upon the bench in Westminster, and taught the 
judges the rulings of their own courts ; who had 
mingled on equal terms in the bouts of lettered wit, 
no longer at the Mermaid, but at Holland House, and 
the breakfast-rooms of accomplished scholars in Lon- 
don and Paris, and Berlin and Rome. He returned 
knowing almost every man and woman of renown in 
Europe ; and he brought back what he carried away, 
— a stainless purity of life, and loftiness of aim, the 
habit of incessant work, which was the law of his 
being, and the tastes of a jurist, but not those of a 
practising lawyer. His look,- his walk, his dress, his 
manner, were not those of the busy advocate, but of 
the cultivated and brilliant man of society, — the 
Admirable Crichton of the saloons. He was oftener 
seen in the refined circles of the city, in the libraries 
and dining-rooms of Prescott and Quiir&y, of Ban- 
croft and Ticlaior, than in the courts of law. Dis- 
tinguished foreigners, constantly arriving, brought 
him letters ; and he took them to the galleries and 
the college. But while he sauntered he studied. 
In his office he was diligently editing great works of 
law ; not practising at the bar, for, indeed, he was 
not formed for a jury lawyer, where the jury was less 
than a nation or mankind. The electric agility, the 
consummate tact, the readiness for every resource, the 
humor that brightens or withers, the command of 
the opposite point of view, the superficial ardor, the 
facility of simulation that makes the worse appear 
the better reason, the j)assionate gust and sweep of 



184 EULOGY BY GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

eloquent appeal, — these were lacking ; and, wanting 
these, he did not seek the laurels of the jury advo- 
cate. Sumner's legal mind at this time, and through- 
out his hfe, was largely moulded, trained to the con- 
templation of great principles and lofty research. As 
one of his admiring comrades, himsolf a renowned 
lawyer, says of him, " In sporting terms, he had a 
good eye for country, but no scent for a trail." The 
movement of his mind was grand and comprehensive. 
He spoke naturally, not in subtle and dexterous pleas, 
but in stately and measured orations. 

When he returned from Europe, he was thought 
to have been too much fascinated by England ; and 
throughout his life it was sometimes said that he was 
still inthralled by his admiration for that country. 
But what is more natural to an American than love of 
England ? Does not Hawthorne instinctively call it 
" our old home " ? The Pilgrims came to plant a 
purer England ; and their children, the colonists, took 
up arms to maintain a truer England, but an England 
still. They became independent, but they did not 
renounce their race nor their language ; and their 
victory left them the advanced outpost of English 
political progress and civilization. The principles 
that we most proudly maintain to-day, those to which 
Sumner's whole life was devoted, are English tradi- 
tions. The great muniments of individual liberty in 
every degree descended to us from our fathers. The 
commonwealth, justice as the political corner-stone, 
the rule of the constitutional majorit}^, the habeas 
corpus^ the trial by jury freedom of speech and of 



EULOGY BY GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 185 

the press, — these are English, and they are ours. I 
do not agree with the melancholy Fisher Ames, 
that " the immortal spii'it of the wood-nymph Liberty 
dwells only in the Enghsh oak;" but the most 
patriotic American may well remember that individual 
freedom sometimes seems almost surer and sturdier 
in England than here, and may wisely repair to drink 
at those elder fountains. No Englishman in this 
generation has more influenced the thought of his 
country than John Stuart Mill; and the truest 
American will find upon his heroic pages gleams of 
a fairer and ampler America than ever in vision even 
Samuel Adams saw. No, no. Plymouth Rock was 
but a stepping-stone from one continent to another, in 
the great march of the same historic development ; 
and to-day, with electric touch, we grasp the hand of 
England under the sea, that the tumult of the ocean 
may not toss us farther asunder, but throb as the beat- 
injx of one common heart. Is it strange, then, that 
the young lawyer, whose deepest instinct was love of 
freedom, and whose youth had been devoted to the 
study of that noble science whose highest purpose 
is to defend individual right, after long residence in 
the land of John Selden, of Coke, of Mansfield, of 
Blackstone, of Romilly, as well as of Shakspeare 
and Bacon, of Newton and Jeremy Taylor ; a land 
which had appealed in every way to his heart, his 
mind, his imagination ; whose history had inspired, 
whose learning had armed him to be a hberator of 
the oppressed, — should always have turned with ad- 
miration to the country " where," as her laureate 
sings, — ^^* 



186 EULOGY BY GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

" Freedom broadeus slowly down 
From precedent to precedent " ? 

MR. Sumner's entrance into the slavery 

CONFLICT. 

Sucli were tlie general influences that moulded 
the young Sumner. But to what a situation in his 
own country he returned! — a situation neither un- 
derstood nor suspected by the fastidious and elegant 
circles which received him. The man never lived 
who enjoyed more, or was more fitted to enjoy, the 
higher delights of human society than Sumner, or who 
might have seemed, to those who scanned his habits 
and his tastes, so little adapted for the heroic part. 
Could the scope and progress and culmination of the 
great contest, which had already begun, have been 
foreseen and measured, Charles Sumner would prob- 
ably have been selected as the type of the cultivated 
and scholarly gentleman, who would recoil from the 
conflict as Sir Thomas Browne shunned the stern 
tumult of the great rebellion. 

In speaking of that conflict, I shall speak plainly : 
I hope to speak truly. To turn to JNIr. Sumner's 
public career is to open a chapter of our history 
written in fire, and closed in blood, but which we 
must be willing to recall if we would justly measure 
the man. Trained, in his own expectation, for other 
ends, framed for friendship, for gentleness, for pro- 
fessional and social ease, and the placid renown of 
letters, he was suddenly caught up into the stormy 
cloud ; and his life became a strife that fiUed a gene- 



EULOGY BY GEORGE WILLIAM CUETIS. 187 

ration. But during all that tremendous time, on 
the one hand enthusiastically trusted, on the other 
contemptuously scorned and hated, his heart was 
that of a little child. He said no unworthy word, he 
did no unmanly deed ; dishonor fled liis face ; and to- 
day those who so long and so naturally, but so wrong- 
fully, believed him their enemy, strew rosemary for 
remembrance upon his grave. 

Down to the year 1830 the moral agitation against 
slavery in this country smouldered. But in that 
year Benjamin Lund}^ touched with fire the soid of 
WiUiam Lloyd Garrison, and that agitation burst out 
again irrepressibly. You remember — who can for- 
get ? — the passionate onset of the abolitionists. It 
was conscience rising in insurrection. They made 
their great appeal with the ardor of martyrs, and the 
zeal of primitive Christians. Fifth-monarchy men, 
ranters. Anabaptists, were never more repugnant to 
their times than they ; and they became the prey of 
the worst and most disorderly passions. The aboli- 
tion missionaries were mobbed, imprisoned, maimed, 
murdered : but still, as, in the bitter days of Puritan 
persecution in Scotland, the undaunted voices of the 
Covenanters were heard singing hymns that echoed 
and re-echoed from peak to peak of the barren moun- 
tains, until the great, dumb wilderness was vocal with 
praise ; so the solemn appeal of the abolitionists to 
the Golden Rule, and the Declaration of Independence, 
echoed from solitary heart to heart, until the land 
rang with the litany of liberty. In politics the dis- 
cussion had been stamped out, like a threatening fire 



188 EULOGY BY GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

upon the prairie, wherever it arose. But, soon after 
Mr. Sumner's return from Europe, this, too, flamed 
out afresh in the attempted annexation of Texas. 
Early in 1845 the pLan was consummated. Mr. 
Summer was a Whig ; but then and always he was, 
above all, a man. He was too well versed in the 
history of freedom not to know that the great victo- 
ries over despotism and slavery in every form had 
been won by united action ; and he knew that united 
action implies organization and a party. But, Avhile 
great political results are to be gained by means of 
great parties, he knew that a party which is too blind 
to see, or too cowardly to acknowledge, the real issue ; 
which pursues its ends, however noble, by ignoble 
means ; which tolerates corruption ; which trusts un- 
worthy men ; which suffers the public service to be 
prostituted to personal ends, — defies reason and con- 
science, and summons all honest men to oppose it. 
When conscience goes, all goes ; and wherever con- 
science went, Charles Sumner followed. It took 
him out of those delightful drawing-rooms and tran- 
quil libraries ; it drew him aAvay from old companions 
and cherished friends ; it exposed him to their sus- 
picion, their hostility, their scorn ; it forbade him the 
peaceful future of his dreams and expectations ; it 
placed him at the fiery heart of the fiercest conflict 
of the century ; it hedged his hfe with insults, and 
threats, and plots of assassination ; it bared liis head 
to the dreadful blow that struck him senseless to the 
Senate-floor, and sent him, a tortured wanderer, be- 
yond the sea ; later it separated him from the co- 



EULOGY BY GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 189 

operation of colleagues, and severed him from his 
party ; and at last it exposed him, sick in body and 
in mind, to the blow that wounded his soul, — the 
censure of his beloved Massachusetts, But he did not 
quail ; he did not falter : he showed himself still to be 
her worthy son. Wherever conscience went, Charles 
Sumner followed. "God help me!" cried Martin 
Luther: "I can no other." "God help me!" said 
Charles Sumner : " I must do my duty." 

The Whigs are, or ought to be, he said in 1845, 
the party of freedom. But when they refused to 
recognize the real contest in the country, by rejecting, 
in their national convention of 1848, the Wilmot 
Proviso, Mr. Sumner went with the other conscience- 
Whigs to Worcester, and organized the Free-soil party. 
And when, in the winter of 1850-51, the Legislature 
of Massachusetts was to elect the successor of Daniel 
Webster in the Senate of the United States, the Free- 
soil chiefs, as upright, able, and patriotic a body of 
political leaders as ever Massachusetts had, deliber- 
ately selected Mr. Sumner as their candidate, — a 
selection which showed the estimate of the man by 
those who knew liim most intimateljs and who most 
thoroughly understood the times. He was young, 
strong, learned, variously accomplished, a miracle of 
industry, zealous, pure, of indomitable courage, and 
of supreme moral energy. But he had little poUtical 
ambition, and in 1846 had peremptorily declined to 
be a candidate for Congress. He was not a member 
of either of the great parties. He would not make 
any pledge of any kind, or move his tongue, or wink 



190 EULOGY BY GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

his eye, to secure success. He was pledged, then and 
always, and only, to his sense of right. He stood for 
no partisan end whatever, but simply and solely for 
uncompromising resistance to slavery. The contest 
of the election was long : it lasted for three months ; 
and on the 24th of April, 1851, he was elected. " I 
accept," he said, " as the servant of Massachusetts, 
mindful of the sentiments uttered by her successive 
legislatures, of the genius which inspires her history, 
and of the men, her perpetual pride and ornament, 
who breathed into her that breath of liberty which 
early made her an example to her sister States," 
How these lofty words lift us out of the grossness of 
public corruption and incapacity, into the air of ideal 
states and public men ! What a stately summons are 
they to his beloved Massachusetts, once more to take 
the lead, and again to guide her sister States to 
greater political purity, and the ancient standards of 
public character and service ! 

The hour in which Mr. Sumner wrote those words 
— the hoiu' of his entrance upon public life — was 
the darkest of our history. But, if his mind had 
turned regretfully to that tranquil career of his ear- 
lier anticipation, how well might his good genius 
have whispered to him what the flower of English 
gentlemen and scholars had written three hundred 
years before, " To what purpose should our thoughts 
be directed to various kinds of knowledge, unless 
room be afforded for putting it into practice, so that 
public advantage may be the result ? " or that other 
strain, full of the music of a consecrated soul, in 



EULOGY BY GEOROE WTT.LTATM CURTIS. 101 

wliicli Philip Sidney writes to his father-iu-hiAV, ^Vixl- 
singham, " I think a wise and constant man oughf 
never to grieve wliile he doth play, as a man may 
say, his own part truly." 

What, then, was the political situation when INIr. 
Sumner entered the Senate ? Slavery had apparently 
subdued the country. Grand juries in the Northern 
States presented citizens who in time of peace wished 
to discuss vital public questions, as guilty of sedition. 
The legislatures were summoned to make their 
speeches indictable offences. In the legislature of 
Rhode Island, such a bill was reported. The gover- 
nor of New York favored such a law. The governor 
of Ohio delivered a citizen of that State to the au- 
thorities of another to be tried for helping a slave to 
escape. The governor of Massachusetts said that all 
discussion of the subject which tended to incite 
insurrection had been held to be indictable. Every 
great national office was then, and long had been, 
held by the ministers of slavery. The American 
ambassadors in Europe were everywhere silent, or 
smoothly apologized. Every committee in Congress 
was the servant of slavery ; and, when the vice-presi- 
dent left his seat in the Senate, it was filled by 
another like himself. All the attendants who stood 
around him, the doorkeepers, messengers, sergeants- 
at-arms, down to the very pages who noiselessly 
skimmed the floor, were selected by its agents. Be- 
yond the superb walls of the Capitol, which Senator 
Benton had long solemnly warned the country was 
built by permission of that supreme power ^hich 



192 EULOGY BY GEOKGE' WILLIAM CUKTIS. 

would seize and occupy it when the time came, the 
whole vast system of national offices was within the 
patronage of slavery. Every little post-office, every 
custom-house clerkship, was a bribe to silence ; while 
the Postmaster-General of the United States robbed 
the mails at its bidding. When Sumner entered the 
Senate, the most absolute subserviency to slavery was 
decreed as the test of nationality ; and that power did 
not hesitate to declare that any serious effort, how- 
ever lawfully made, to change its policy, would strike 
the tocsin of civil war. Meanwhile, at the very mo- 
ment of his election, the horrors of the Fugitive-Slave 
Law had burst upon thousands of innocent homes, 
"^'lothers snatched their children, and fled they knew 
not whither. Brave men, long safe in recovered lib- 
erty, were seized for no crime but misfortune, and 
hurried to their doom. Young men and girls who 
had been always free, always residents of their own 
States, were kidnapped and sold. The anguish, the 
sublime heroism, of this ghastly persecution fills one 
of the most tragical and most inspiring epochs of our 
story. Even those who publicly sustained the law 
from a sense of duty secretly helped the flpng fugi- 
tives upon their way. The human heart is stronger 
than soj^histry. The man who impatiently exclaimed 
that of course the law was hard, but it Avas the law, 
and must be obeyed, suddenly felt the quivering, 
panting fugitive clinging to his knees, guilty of no 
crime, and begging only the succor which no hon- 
est heart would refuse a dog cowering upon his 
tlu-eshold ; and as he heard the dread power thunder- 



EULOGY BY GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 103 

ing at the door, " I am tlie law : give me my prey ! " 
in the same moment he heard God knocldng at his 
heart, " Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least 
of these my little ones, ye have done it unto me." 

Those days are passed. That fearful conflict is 
over ; and the flowers just strewn all through these 
sorrowing States, indiscriminately upon the graves 
of the blue and the gray, show how truly it is ended. 
Heaven knows I speak of it with no willingness, with 
no bitterness ; but how can I show you Charles Sum- 
ner if I do not show you the time that made him 
what he was ? This was the political and moral sit- 
uation of the country when he took the oath as sen- 
ator, on the 1st of December, 1851. The famous 
political triumvirate of the former generation was 
gone. Mr. Calhoun, the master-will of the three, 
had ched in the previous year ; Mr. Webster was 
Secretary of State ; and Henry Clay, with fading eye, 
and bowed frame, and trembling voice, — Henry Clay, 
compromise incarnate, — feebly tottered out of the 
chamber as Charles Sumner, conscience incarnate, 
came in. As he took the oath the new triumvirate was 
complete ; for Mr. Seward and Mr. Chase had taken 
their seats two years before. For some months Mr. 
Sj^imner did not speak upon the great topic ; and many 
of his friends at home thought liim keeping silence 
too long, half fearing that he too had been enchanted 
by the woful Cu-ce of the South. They did not know 
how carefully slavery prevented him from finding an 
opi)ortunity. A month Ixifore he could get the floor for 
his purpose, Theodore Parker said, in a public speech, 

17 



194 EULOGY BY GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

" I wish lie had spoken long ago. . . . But it is for 
him to decide, not for us. ' A fool's bolt is soon 
shot,' while a wise man often reserves his fire." At 
length, on the 26th of August, 1852, after many 
efforts to be heard, Mr. Sumner obtained the floor, 
saying, as he arose, "* The subject is at last broadly 
before the Senate, and by the blessing of God it shall 
be tliscussed." 

THE FIRST GREAT SPEECH UPON THE REPEAL OF 
THE FUGITIVE-SLAVE LAW. 

This first great speech upon the repeal of the Fugi- 
tive-Slave Law was the most significant event in the 
Senate since Mr. Webster's reply to Hajnie, and an 
epitome of Mr. Sumner's whole public career. It 
was one of the words that are events, and from which 
historical epochs take their departure. These are 
strong words. See if they are justified. The slavery 
debate was certainly the most momentous that had 
ever occurred in the country ; and brave words had 
been already uttered for freedom. The subtle and 
sanguine and sagacious Seward had spoken often 
and wisely. The passionless Chase, with massive and 
Websterian logic, had pressed his solid reasoning 
home ; and the gay humor of Hale had irradiated his 
earnest and strenuous appeals. But all of these men 
were known to their colleagues as members of 
parties, as politicians, as men of political ambition. 
With such elements and men, slavery was accus- 
tomed to deal. Carefully studying the senator from 
jSew York, it saw, with the utmost purity of charac- 



EULOGY BY GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 195 

ter, trained ability, acute political instinct, and parti- 
san habit, the intellectual optimist, who grasped the 
situation with his brain rather than ^^dth his heart 
and conscience. It tested him by its own terrible 
earnestness. It weighed him in the balance of its 
own unqnailing and uncompromising resolution, and 
found him wanting. Do not misunderstand me. Mr. 
Seward was the only political leader for whom I had 
ever felt the admiring loyalty which older men felt 
for Webster and Calhoun and Clay. His career has 
been nobly set forth by your own distinguished citi- 
zen, Mr. Adams, in his discourse before the legisla- 
ture of New York. And, as he went to Albany to 
say Avhat he believed to be the truth, so have I come 
hither. Slavery knew Mr. Seward to be accustomed 
to political considerations, to joarty necessities, to the 
claims of compromise. It knew the scope of his 
political philosophy, the brightness of his hope of 
American glory under the Union, the steady certain- 
ty of his trust that all would be well. Even if, like 
Webster and Calhoun and Clay, he saw the gather- 
ing storm, he thought — and he did not conceal his 
thought — that he had the confidence of his oppo- 
nents, and could avert or control the tempest. Slave- 
ry knew that he could not. If he proudly declaied 
the higher law, slavery knew that he did it, as Plato 
announced the Golden Rule, as a thinker, not as an 
actor ; as a jDhilosopher, not as the founder of a reli- 
gion, ready to be sealed with fire and blood. But this 
was the very spirit of slavery ; and it did not see it to 
be his. 



106 EULOGY BY G20RGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

In the midst of a speech which logically cut the 
ground from beneath the slave interest, and calmly 
foretold the blessing of the emancipation that was 
unavoidable, Mt. Seward would sometimes turn, and 
hold out his fingers for a pinch of snuff toward some 
southern senator, who, turning away his face, offered 
him the box. When the Senate adjourned, Mr. Sew- 
ard would perhaps join the same colleague, to stroll 
home along the avenue as if they had been country 
lawyers coming from a court where they had l)een 
arguing a dry point of law. It showed how imper- 
fectly he felt, or how inadequately he measured, the 
sullen intensity and relentless purpose of the spirit 
which dominated our politics, and would pause at 
nothing in its course. In a word, that spirit was 
essentially revolutionary, and Mr. Seward had not a 
revolutionary fibre in his being. Long afterward, 
when the movement of secession had begun, as he 
walked with a fellow-senator to the Capitol, on the 
morning of Washington's birthday, he saw on all 
sides the national flags fluttering in the sun, and ex- 
claimed to his companion, with triumphant incre- 
duhty, " Look there ! see those flags ! And yet they 
talk of disunion ! " 

Up to the moment of Mr. Svmmer's appearance in 
the Senate, Mr. Seward had been the foremost anti- 
slavery leader in pubhc life. But slavery, carefully 
studying liim, believed, as I think, that he would 
compromise. That was the test. If he would com- 
promise, he might annoy, but he was not to be feared. 
If he would compromise, he might melodiously sing 



EULOGY BY GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 107 

the glory of the Union at his pleasure. If he would 
compromise, he would yield. If he were not as in- 
vincibly resolute as slavery, he was already con- 
quered ; and he was the leader of the North. 
There sat Seward in the Senate ; yes, and there 
Webster had sat, there Clay had sat, with all their 
great and memorable service ; there in its presid- 
ing chair Millard Fillmore had sat ; and over them 
all slavery had stalked straight on in its remorse- 
less, imperial career. And if, as Mr. Seward's, most 
able eulogist mournfully remarks, he was permitted 
at last to leave pubhc life " with fewer marks of 
recognition of his brilliant career than he would 
have had if he had been the most insignificant of 
our presidents," may it not be, that without ques- 
tioning his generous character, his lofty ability, and 
his illustrious service, there was a general feelino*, 
that, in the last administration under which he served, 
he had seemed in some degree to justify the instinct 
of slavery, that his will was not as sternly inexorable 
as its own ? 

I do not, of course, forget that compromise makes 
government possible, and that the Union was based 
upon it. "All government," says Burke, "is 
founded upon compromise and barter. . . . But," he 
adds, " in all fair dealing, the thing bought must bear 
some proportion to the purchase paid. None will 
barter away the immediate jewel of the soul." So 
Sir James Mackintosh said of Lord Somors, whom ho 
described as the perfect model of a wise statesman in 
a fi-ee community, that " to be useful, he submitted to 

17* 



lOS EULOGY BY GEORGE WILLIAM CUHTTS. 

compromise with the evil that he coiikl not extir- 
pate." But it is the instinct of the highest states- 
manship to know wlien the jewel of which Burke 
speaks is demanded, and to resolve that at any cost 
it shall not be sold. John Pym had it when he car- 
ried up to the lords the impeachment of Strafford. 
John Adams had it when he lifted the Continental 
Congress in his arms, and hurled it over the irrevo- 
cable line of independence. Charles Sumner had it 
when, at the close of his first great speech in the 
Senate, he exclaimed, in the face of slavery in its 
highest seat, " By the Constitution which I have 
sworn to support, I am bound to disobey this act." 
Until that moment shivery had not seen in public 
life the man whom it truly feared. But now, amazed, 
incredulous, appalled, it felt that it had met its 
master. Here was a spirit as resolute and haughty 
as its own, with resources infinitely richer. Here at 
last was the North, the American conscience, the 
American will, — the heir of the traditions of Eng- 
lish Magna Charta, and, far beyond them, of the old 
Swiss cantons high on the heaven-kissing Alps, — the 
spirit that would not wince, nor compromise, -nor 
bend, but Avliich, like a cliff of adamant, said to the 
furious sea, " Here shall thy proud waves be stayed." 
Ten years afterward, when States were seceding 
and prepaiing to secede, when the reluctant mind 
of the North began to see that war was possible, 
when even many of Mr. Sumner's and Mr. Seward's 
party friends trembled in dismay, Mr. Seward ended 
liis last speech in the Senate, a guarded plea for the 



EULOGY BY GEOEGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 199 

Union, by concessions wliich amazed many of his 
most earnest friends. I know that he thought it the 
part of a wise statesmanship that he who was to be 
the head of the new administration shoukl retain, if 
possible, the support of the opposition of the North, 
by shunning every thing like menace, and by speaking 
in the most temperate and conciliatory tone. But 
his mournful concluding words, ''I learned early 
from Jefferson that in political affairs we cannot al- 
ways do what seems to us absolutely best," sounded 
at that time, and under those circumstances, like a 
mortal cry of defeat and surrender. And, at the very 
time that Mr. Seward was speaking these words, Mr. 
Sumner was one evening surprised by a visit in 
Washington from a large number of the most con- 
spicuous citizens of Boston, all of whom had been 
among his strongest and most positive political op- 
ponents. He welcomed them gravely, seeing that 
their purpose w-as very serious ; and, after a few mo- 
ments, the most distinguished member of the party 
made an impassioned appeal to the senator. " You 
know us all," he said, " as fellow-citizens of yours, 
who have always and most strongly regretted and 
opposed your political course. But at this awful 
moment, when the country hangs upon the edge of 
civil war, — and what civH war means you know, — 
we believe that there is one man only who can avert 
the threatening calamity ; one man whom the North 
really trusts, and by whose counsels it will be guided. 
We believe that you are that man. The North will 
listen to you, and to no other ; and we are here in the 



200 EULOGY BY GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

name of liumauity and civilization, to implore you to 
save your country." The speaker was greatly af- 
fected; and, after a moment, Mr. Sumner said, "Sir, 
I am surprised that you attribute to me such in- 
fluence. I will, however, assume it. Be it so. 
What, then, is it that you would have me do ? " — 
" We implore you, Mr. Sumner, as you love your 
country and your God, to vote for the Crittenden 
Compromise." — " Sir," said Charles Sumner, rising to 
his lofty height, and never more Charles Sumner 
than in that moment, " if what you say is indeed 
true, and if at this moment the North trusts me, as 
you think, beyond all others, it is because the North 
knows that under no circumstances whatever woidd 
I compromise." 

It was precisely because slavery recognized this 
when he made his first important speech, and felt for 
the first time the immense force behind his words, 
that I call that speech so significant an event. I do 
not claim for Sumner deeper convictions, or a sterner 
will, than those of many of his associates. But the 
abolitionists, however devoted and eloquent, were 
only private citizens, and agitators, who adjured 
political methods. They seemed, to the supreme in- 
fluence in the government, a band of pestilent fanat- 
ics. But Charles Sumner in the Senate, Charles 
Sumner in the seat of Daniel Webster, saying that 
the Constitution forbade him to obey the Fugitive- 
Slave Law, was not an individual : he was a represen- 
tative man. No meeting of enthusiastic men and 
women in a schoolhouse had sent him to the Senate, 



EULOGY BY GEORGE WILLIAM CITETIS. 201 

but the legislature of a State : not that alone ; foi 
that legislature had not sent him as the representative 
of a party, but of an idea, — an idea which had been 
powerful enough to hold its friends close together 
through a contest of three months, and at last, de- 
feating the influences which had so long controlled 
unquestioned the politics of the State, had lifted 
into the Senate a man pledged only to cry, Delenda 
est Carthago^ and who, by the law of his mental and 
moral structure, could no more compromise the prin- 
ciple at stake than he could tell a lie. Still furtlier : 
slavery heard the young senator proudly assert 
that the Constitution did not recognize slavery, ex- 
cept in the slave-trade clause, whose force was long 
since spent ; that the clause upon which the Fugitive 
Law was grounded was a mere compact, conferring 
no power ; and that every detail of the process pro- 
vided was flagrantly and palpably unconstitutional. 
Slavery, he insisted, was sectional, li1)erty national ; 
and, throwing this popular cry to the country, he 
irradiated his position with so splendid an illumination 
of illustration, precedent, argument, appeal, that it 
shone all over the land. How, like a sunrise, it 
strengthened and stimulated and inspired the North ! 
It furnished the quiver of a thousand orators and 
newspapers, and was an exhaustless treasury of re- 
sources for the debate. Above all, it satisfied men 
bred in reverence of law that their duty as citizens 
was coincident with the dictates of their consciences, 
and that the Constitution justified them in withstand- 
ing the statute which their souls loathed. 



202 EULOGY BY GEORGE WTLLTAM CURTIS. 

This was the very service that the countiy needed 
at that time. And, that no dramatic effect shouhl be 
wanting, as Henry Clay had left the Senate for the 
last time on the day that Mr. Sumner was sworn in, 
so, as he was making his first great plea for justice 
under the Constitution, his predecessor, Daniel 
.Webster, then Secretary of State, came into the 
chamber, and also for the last time. I know no more 
impressive scene. There is the old senator, then the 
chief figure in America, who a year before, on the 
7th of March, had made his last speech, supporting 
the policy of the Fugitive-slave Bill, and against the 
Wilraot Proviso. Worn, wasted, sad, with powers so 
great, and public service so renowned, the Olympian 
man, who had sought so long, so ably, so vainly, to 
placate the implacable, his seventy years ending in 
baffled hopes, and bitter disappointment, and a broken 
heart, gazed, with those eyes of depthless melancholy, 
upon his successor. And here stands that successor, 
with the light of spotless youth upon his face, tower- 
ing, dauntless, radiant ; the indomitalde Puritan, 
speaking as a lawyer, a statesman, and a man, not 
for his State alone, nor for his country only, but for 
human rights everywhere and always, forecasting the 
future, heralding the new America. As Webster 
looked and listened, did he recall the words of that 
vounger man seven years before, in Faneuil Hall, 
when he prayed the party that Webster led to declare 
for emancipation ? Did he remember the impassioned 
appeal to himself, that, as he had justly earned the 
title of Defender of the Constitution, so now he 



EULOGY BY GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 203 

should devote his marvellous powers to the overthrow 
of slavery, and thereby win a nobler name ? Alas ! 
it was demanding dawn of the sunset. It was 
beseeching yesterday to return to-morrow. It was 
imploring Daniel Webster to be Charles Sumner, 
No, fellow-citizens, in that appeal Sumner forecast his 
own glory. " Assume, then," cried he, " these unper- 
formed duties. The aged shall bear witness to you ; 
the young shall kindle with lapture as they repeat 
the name of Webster; the large company of the 
ransomed shall teach their children, and their children's 
children, to the latest generation, to call you blessed; 
and you shall have yet another title, never to be 
forgotten on earth or in heaven, — Defender of 
Humanity." 

I dwell upon tliis first great speech of Mr. Sum- 
ner's in the Senate, because it illustrates his own 
public qualities and character, his aims and his 
methods. He began to take an official part in affairs 
when all questions were determined by a single in- 
terest, a single policy, and all issues grew out of that. 
His nature was so transparent and simple, and the 
character of his relation to his time so evident, that 
there is but one story to tell. All his greater speeches 
upon domestic topics, after that of August, 1852, 
were but amplifications of the theme. The power 
that he had defied did not jelax, but redoubled its 
efforts to subdue the country to its will ; and every 
new attempt found Sumner with more practised 
powers, with more comprehensive resources, ready 
and eager for the battle. For the whole of liis 



204 EULOGY BY GEORGE ■WILLIAM CITRTIS. 

active career, before, during, and after the war, his 
work was substantially the same. He was essentially 
an orator and a moral reformer ; and with unsurpassed 
earnestness of appeal, emphasized from first to last 
by the incalculable weight of his commanding char- 
acter, his work was to rouse and kindle and inspire 
the public opinion of the country to his own uncom- 
promising hostility to slavery. In this crusade he 
traversed the land, as it were, by his speeches, a new 
Peter the Hermit; and by his sincerity, his uncon- 
querable zeal, his affluent learning, making history 
and literature and art tributary to his purpose, he 
entered the houses and hearts and minds of the people 
of the Northern States, and fanned the flame of a 
holy hatred of the intolerable and audacious wrong. 
It was indispensable to this work, that he should 
not be able to admit any qualification of its absorb- 
ing necessity, or any abatement of the urgency with 
which it must be pursued. Once in later days, wlien 
I argued with him that opponents might be sincere, 
and that there was some reason on the other side, he 
thundered in reply, " Upon such a question there is 
no other side ! " The time required such a leader,— 
a man who did not believe there was another side to 
the question, who would treat difference of opinion 
almost as moral dehnquency ; and the hour found the 
man in Sumner. 

THE NEEDS OF THE TIME MET BY IMR. SUMNER. 

For see what the leadership of opinion in this 
country then demanded. In the first place, and for 



_^ 



ETJLOGY BY GEOKGE -WILLIAM CURTIS. 205 

the reasons I have mentioned, — the instinct, tradi- 
tions, and habits of the dominant race in our civili- 
zation, — such a leader must be a man who showed 
that the great principles of liberty, but of liberty un- 
der law, of what we call regulated liberty, were on 
his side ; whose familiarity with the Constitution and 
with constitutional interpretation, and whose stand- 
ing among lawyers who dealt with the comprehen- 
sive spirit and purpose of the law, was recognized 
and commanding ; so that, instructed by him, the 
farmer in the field, the mechanic in his shop, the 
traveller by the way, — all law-loving Americans 
everywhere, could maintain the contest with their 
neighbors, point by point, upon the letter of the Con- 
stitution, or show, or think they showed, that the 
supreme law in its intention, in the purpose of its 
authors, by the unquestionable "witness of the time, 
demanded an interpretation and a statute in favor of 
liberty. Then, in the second place, this leader must 
be identified with a political party; for the same in- 
stinct which seeks the law, and leans upon precedent, 
acts through the organization of parties. The Free- 
soil sentiment that sent Sumner to the Senate was the 
real creative force in our politics at that time. It had 
a distinct organization in several States. It had 
nominated presidential candidates at Buffalo ; and, 
although the AVhig and Democratic were still the 
great parties, the Free-soil principle was necessarily 
the nucleus around which a new and truly national 
party must presently gather. In 1852 the common 
enemy silenced the Whig party, which almost in- 

18 



20G EULOGY BY GEORGE WTLLTAM CCTRTIS. 

stantly dissolved as a powerful element in politics ; 
and the Republican party arose. No man had done 
more to form the opinion, and deepen the conviction, 
from which it sprang, than Sumner : no man accepted 
its aid with more alacrity, or saw more clearly its 
immense opportunity. As early as September, 1854, 
he declared in the State convention of his political 
friends, " As Republicans we go forth to encounter 
the oligarchs of slavery ; " and eighteen years after- 
wards, in warning the party against what he thought 
to be a fatal course, he said that he had been one of 
the straitest of the sect, who had never failed to 
sustain its candidates, or to advance its principles. 
He was indeed one of its fathers. No citizen who 
has acted with that j)arty will question the great- 
ness of his service to it: no citizen who opposed 
that party will deny it. The personal assault upon 
him in the Senate, following his prodigious defence 
of the Republican position and policy, and, soon 
after, the first national nominations of the party, 
made him, throughout the inspiring summer of 1856, 
to the imaginations of the twelve hundred thousand 
men who voted for its candidates, the very type and 
illustration of their hojje and purpose. Nothing less 
than such humanity in the national policy, and such 
lofty character in public life, as were expressed by the 
name of Charles Sumner, was the aim of the great 
political awalvcning of that time. The rank and file 
of the party, to borrow a military phrase, dressed 
upon Sumner ; and long afterward, when party dif- 
ferences had arisen, I am sure that I si:)oke for the 



EDXOGY BY GEORGE WILLIAM CUETIS. 207 

great body of his political associates wlien I said to 
one who indignantly regretted his course, that while 
at that time, and under those circumstances, we could 
not approve his judgment, yet there were thousands 
and thousands of men who would be startled and 
confused to find themselves marching, in a pohtical 
campaign, out of step with Charles Sumner. Thus 
he satisfied the second imperative condition of leader- 
shijo of which I speak, as a conspicuous and decided 
party chief. 

But there were certain modifications of these con- 
ditions, essential to the position ; and these also were 
found in Sumner. Such was the felicity of his ca- 
reer, that even his defects of constitution served to 
equip him more fully for his task. Thus, while it 
was indispensable, under the circumstances, that he 
should be a constitutional and international lawyer, 
it was no less essential that his mind should deal 
more with principles than with details, and with the 
spirit rather than the letter. He saw so clearly the 
great end to be achieved, that he seemed sometimes 
almost to assume the means. Like an Alpine guide 
leading his company of travellers toward the pure 
and awful heights, with liis eye fixed upon their ce- 
lestial beauty, and his soul breathing an 

" Ampler ether, a diviner air," 

he moved straight on, disdaining obstacles that would 
have perplexed a guide less absolutely absorbed, and 
who by moments of doubt and hesitation would have 
imperilled every thing. 



208 EULOGY BY GEOEGE WILLIAM CUETIS. 

Thus his legal mind, in the pursuit of a moral end, 
had sometimes what I may call a happy lack of logic. 
Sure of his end, and that every thing ought to make 
for it, he felt that every thing did make for it. For 
instance, his first great public oration, upon "■ The 
True Grandeur of Nations," was a most powerful 
presentation of the glory and beauty of peace, and a 
mighty denunciation of the horrors and wrongs of 
war. It was an intrepid and impressive discourse, 
and its influence will be deep and lasting ; but it 
overstated its own case. It exposed the citizen sol- 
dier not only to ridicule, but to moral aversion. And 
yet the young men who sat in martial array before 
the orator had not submitted to military discipline 
merely for the splendor of a parade, but that in the 
solemn and exigent hour they. might the more effec- 
tively defend the public safety and private honor, the 
school and the hospital, and social order itself, the 
only guaranty of peace ; and all this not at the arbi- 
trary command of their own will, but by the lawful 
and considered word of the civil power. What is 
the military force which he derided but, in the last 
resort, the law which he revered, in execution ? As 
a friend asked him. Are the judgments of Story and 
Shaw advice merely ? Do they not, if need be, com- 
mand every bayonet in the State ? Is force wrong ? 
and must the policeman not only be prohibited from 
carrying a pistol or club, but must he be forbidden 
to lay his hand upon the thief in the act to compel 
him to the station ? The young citizen soldiers who 
sat before the orator were simply the ultimate police. 



EULOGY BY GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 200 

To decry to them, with resounding and affluent power, 
the practice which covered war with a false hist re, 
was a nol:)le service ; but to do it in a way that would 
forbid the just and lawful punishment of a murderer 
disclosed a defective logic. Thus Sumner sometimes 
used arguments that were two-edged swords, apt to 
wound the wielder as well as the enemy. And so he 
sometimes adopted propositions of constitutional or 
international law which led straight to his moral end, 
but which would hardly have endured the legal mi- 
croscope. Yet he maintained them with such fervor 
of conviction, such an array of precedent, such am- 
plitude of illustration, that to the great popular mind, 
morally exalted like his own, his statements had the 
majesty and the conclusiveness of demonstrations. 

And this, again, was what the time needed. The 
debate was essentially, although under the forms of 
law, revolutionary. It aimed at the displacement, 
not only of an administration, but of a theory of the 
government and of traditional usage that did not 
mean to yield without a struggle. It required, there- 
fore, not the judicially logical mind, nor the fine touch 
of casuistry that splits and halts and defers until the 
cause is lost, but the mind so absolutely alive with 
the idea, and fixed upon the end, that it compels the 
means. John Pym was resolved that Strafford should 
be impeached, and he found the law for it. Charles 
Sumner was resolved that slavery should fall, and ho 
found the Constitution for it. When the great debate 
ended, and there was the moment of dread silence 
before the outburst of civil war, — the legal casui,4ry, 

18* 



210 EULOGY BY GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

which had found the terrors of the Fugitive-Slave Law 
constitutional, could see no power in the Constitution 
to coerce States, — Charles Sumner, who had found in 
the Constitution no authority for slave-hunting, 
answered the furious cannonade at Fort Sumter Ly 
declaring that slavery had legally destroyed itself, 
and by demanding immediate emancipation. 

And, as the crisis in which Sumner lived required 
that in a leader the qualities of a lawyer should be 
modified by those of the patriot and the moralist, 
so it demanded that the party man should be more 
than a partisan. He never forgot that a party is a 
means, not an end. He knew the joy and the power 
of association, — no man better. He knew the history 
of parties everywhere, — in Greece and Rome, in 
England and France, and in our own earlier day ; 
and he knew how insensibly a party comes to re- 
semble an army, and an army to stand for the coun- 
try and cause which it has defended. But he knew, 
above all, that parties are kept pure and useful only 
by the resolute independence of their members ; and 
that those leaders, whom, from their lofty principle 
and uncompromising qualities, parties do not care 
to nominate, are the very leaders who make parties 
able to elect their candidates. The Republican party 
was organized to withstand slavery when slavery 
dared all. It needed, therefore, one great leader, at 
least, who was not merely a partisan, who did not 
work for party ends, but for the ends of the party. 
It needed a man absorbed and mastered by hostility 
to slavery; a man of one idea, like Columbus, with 



EULOGY BY GEOIIGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 211 

his whole soul trembling ever to the west, wearying 
courts and kings and councils with his single in- 
cessant and importunate plea, until he sailed over 
the horizon, and gave a New World to the Old ; a 
man of one idea, like Luther, pleading his private 
conscience against the ancient hierarchy, and giving 
both worlds religious liberty. Yes, a man of one 
idea, — this was what the time demanded in public 
and party life, and this it found in Charles Sumner ; 
not an anti-slavery man only, but a man in whose 
soul for thirty years the sigh of the slave never 
ceased, and whose dying words were a prayer to save 
the l)ill that made that slave wholly an equal citizen. 
When the Republican party came into power, it 
was forced to conduct a war in which the very same 
qualities were demanded. The public mind needed 
constantly to be roused and sustained by the trumpet- 
note of an ever higher endeavor; and from no leader 
did it hear that tone more steadily and clearly than 
from Sumner. When the most radical, which in 
such a moment is the wisest, policy came to be dis- 
cussed in detailed measures, he had already robbed 
it of its terrors by making it familiar. While Con- 
gress declared, by a vote almost unanimous, that 
emancipation was not a purpose or an element of the 
war, Sumner proclaimed to the country that slavery 
was perpetual war, and that emancipation only was 
peace. Like Nelson in the battle of the Baltic, 
when the admiral signalled to stop fighting, lie put 
the glass to his blind eye, and sliouted, " I don't see 
the admiral's signal : nail my own colors to the mast 



212 EULOGY BY GEOr.GE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

for closer l)attle ! " As before the war, so while it 
raged, he felt the imperial necessity of the conclusion 
so strono-ly that he made all arguments serve, and 
forced all facts into line. He was alive with the 
truth that Dry den nobly expresses : " I have heard, 
indeed, of some virtuous persons who have ended 
unfortunately; but never of any virtuous nation. 
Providence is engaged too deeply when the cause 
becomes so general." Mr. Lincoln, who was a nat- 
ural diplomatist, fortunately understood Mr. Sum- 
ner. The president knew as well as the senator 
that the war sprung from slavery. He had already 
said that the house of the Union divided against itself 
could not stand. He knew as well as Sumner that 
slavery must be smitten. But he knew also that in 
his position he could not smite until public opinion 
lifted his arm. To stimulate that opinion, therefore, 
was the most precious service to the president, to 
the country, and the world. Thus it was not the ap- 
peal to Lincoln, it was the appeal to public oi^inion, 
that was demanded. It was not Sumner's direct, but 
his reflected light that was so useful. And when the 
president at last raised his arm, — for he pulled no 
unripe fruit, and he did nothing until he thought the 
time had fully come, — he knew that the country was 
ready, and that no man more than Sumner had made 
it so. When the Assistant Secretary of State carried 
the engrossed copy of the emancipation proclamation 
to Mr. Lincoln to sign, he had been shaking hands 
all the morning, so that liis writing was unsteady. 
He looked at it for a moment, with his sadly humor- 



EULOGY BY GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 213 

ous smile, and then said, " When people see that 
shaky signature, they will say, ' See how uncertain 
he was ! ' But I was never surer of any tiling in my 
Hfe." 

But, while Sumner righteously stimulated public 
opinion during the war, not less, on one memorable 
occasion, did he righteously moderate it. I once ven- 
tured to ask Mr. Seward, what, in his judgment, was 
the darkest hour of the war. He answered in- 
stantly, " The time that elapsed between my in- 
formally sending to Lord Lyons a draft of my reply 
in the ' Trent ' case, and my hearing from him that it 
would be satisfactory." He thought it the darkest 
hour, because he knew that in that reply he had made 
the utmost concession that public opinion would toler- 
ate ; and, if it were not satisfactory, nothing remained 
but war with England, — a war which, Mr. Adams tells 
us, he thinks that the British government expected, 
and for which it had already issued naval instruc- 
tions. Mr. Sumner, who was most friendly with Mr. 
Seward, was chairman of the Senate Committee of 
Foreign Relations ; and, next to his constant and in- 
spiring consciousness that he was a senator of Massa- 
chusetts, his position at the head of that committee 
was the pride and glory of his official life. Fcav men 
in the country have ever been so amply fitted for it 
as he. From liis youth he had been a student of in- 
ternational law. He was master of its history and 
literature. It was his hope — surely a noble ambi- 
tion — to contribute to it something that might still 
further humanize the comity of nations. He was 



214 EULOGY BY GEOKGE WILLIAM CUIITIS. 

familiar with the current politics of the world ; and 
he personally knew most of the distinguished foreign 
statesmen of his time. Above all, he brought to his 
chair the lofty conviction expressed by another 
master of international law, that " the same rules of 
morality which hold together men in families, and 
which form families into commonwealths, also link 
together those commonwealths as members of the 
great society of mankind." He was very proud of 
that chairmanship; and when, in the spring of 1871, 
upon the annual renewal of the committees of the 
Senate, his Republican colleagues decided not to re- 
store him to his chair, he felt degraded and humiliated 
before the country and foreign powers. He had held 
it for ten years. His party was still in the ascendant. 
His qualifications were undeniable. And he felt that 
the refusal to restore him implied some deep distrust 
or dissatisfaction, for which, whatever good reasons 
existed, none but the pleasure of the Senate has yet 
been given to the country. 

While he was still chairman, and at a critical 
moment, the seizure of " The Trent" was hailed with 
frantic applause. Nothing seemed less likely than 
that an administration could stand which should re- 
store the prisoners ; and Mr. Seward's letter was one 
of the ablest and most skilful that he ever wrote. 
Mr. Adams says frankl}^, that, in his judgment, it 
saved the unity of the nation. But the impressive 
fact of the moment was the acquiescence of the 
country in the surrender ; and that, in great degree, 
was due to the conclusive demonstration made by 



EULOGY BY GEOEGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 215 

Mr. Sumner, that fidelity to our own principles re- 
quired the surrender. It was precisely one of the 
occasions when his value as a public man was plainly 
evident. From the crowded diplomatic gallery in the 
Senate, attentive Europe looked and listened. His 
words were weighed, one b}^ one, by men whom sym- 
pathy Avdth his cause did not seduce, nor a too sus- 
ceptible imagination betray ; and Avho acknowledged, 
when he ended, not only that the nation had escaped 
war, and that the action of the administration had 
been vindicated, but that the renown of the country 
had been raised by the clear and luminous statement 
of its humane and peaceful traditions of neutrality. 
" Until to-day," said one of the most accomplished of 
those diplomatists, " I have considered Mr. Sumner 
as a doctrinaire : henceforth, I recognize him as a 
statesman." He had silenced England by her historic 
self : he had justified America by her own honorable 
precedent. The country knew that he spoke from 
the fullest knowledge, and with the loftiest American 
and humane purpose ; and his service in promoting 
national acquiescence in the surrender of the captives 
was as characteristic as in nerving the public mind to 
demand emancipation. 

MR. Sumner's love of truth and justice. 

But, while Mr. Sumner's public career was chiefly 
a relentless warfare with slavery, it was only because 
slavery was the present and palpable form of that in- 
justice with which his nature was at war. The spring 
of his public life was that overpowering love of 



21(') EULOGY BY GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

peace and justice and equality which spoke equally 
in his early Prison-Discipline debates ; in the Fourth- 
of-July oration in Boston ; in his literary addresses ; 
in the powerful anti-slavery speeches in the Senate ; 
in his advocacy of emancipation as the true policy of 
the war, and of equal civil and political rights as the 
guaranty of its results ; in his senatorial efforts to 
establish arbitration ; in his condemnation of priva- 
teering, prize-money, and letters-of-marque ; in his 
arraignment of Great Britain for a policy which 
favored slavery ; in his unflinching persistence for the 
Civil-Rights Bill ; in liis last great protest against the 
annexation of San Domingo ; and his denunciation of 
what he thought a cruel and un-American hostility 
to the Republic of Hayti. He was a born warrior 
with pu])lic injustice. 

INIany public men permit their hostility to a wrong 
to l)e modified in its expression b}^ personal feeling ; 
and to reflect that good men, from the influence of 
birth and training, may sometimes support a wrong 
system. But Sumner saw in his opponents not per- 
sons, but a cause ; and, like Socrates in the battle, he 
smote to the death, but w4th no personal hostility. 
In turn, he was so identified with his own cause, that 
he seemed to his opponents to be the very spirit with 
which they contended, visible, aggressive, arrogant. 
His tone in debate, when he arraigned slavery, — 
although he arraigned slavery alone, — was so un- 
sparing, that all its supporters felt themselves to be 
personally insulted. After the war began, I heard his 
speech in the Senate for the expulsion of Mr. Bright 



EULOGY BY GEORGE WILLIAM GUBTIS. 217 

of Indiana, for commerce with the enemy. It was a 
lash of scorpions. Mr. Bright sat in his place, pale 
and livid by turns, and gazing at Mr. Sumner as if 
he could scarce restrain himself from springing at his 
throat. Yet when the orator shook his lifted finsrer 
at his colleague, and hurled at him his scathing sen- 
tences, it was not the man that he saw before him : 
he saw only the Rebellion, only slavery in arms, with 
Catilinian audacity proudly thrusting itself into the 
Capitol, and daring to sit in the very Senate-chamber. 
But Mr. Sumner's attitude and tone that da}'-, witli a 
vast majority at his side, with a friendly army in the 
cit}'-, were no bolder, no more Resolutely defiant, than 
when he stood in the same chamber demandingr the 
expulsion of slavery from the statute-book, while the 
majority of his colleagues would fain have silenced 
him, and the city was a cump of his enemies. 

THE PEIIEL OF HIS POSITION". 

It was often said that it was impossible he should 
know the peril of his position. It was not that. 
He did know it. Bvit he saw and feared a greater 
peril, — that of not doing his duty. He often stood 
practically alone among responsible public men. 
The spirit which begged Abraham Lincoln to strike 
out of his Springfield speech, in 1858, the words, "a 
house divided against itself cannot stand ; " a request 
which Mr. Lincoln said that he would Carefully con- 
sider, and, having considered, spoke the words, and 
went straight on to the presidency, and a ghjrioiis 
renown, — this sphit censured Sumner's fanaticism, 

VJ 



218 EULOGY BY GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

his devotion to one idea ; derided his rhetoric, liis 
false taste, his want of logic ; ridiculed his want of 
tact, his ignorance of men, his visionary views, his 
impracticability. Indeed, there Avere times when it 
almost seemed that friends joined with foes to shear 
Samson's flowing hair, while Samson was smiting the 
Philistines. If friends remonstrated, he replied, " I 
am a public servant : I am a sentinel of my country, 
I must cry ' Halt! ' though it be only a shadow that 
passes, and not bring my piece to a rest until I 
know who goes there." It was an ideal vigilance, 
an ideal sense of duty. I grant it. He was an 
ideal character. He loved duty more than friend- 
ship ; and he had that supreme quality of manhood, 
the power to go alone. I am not anxious to call him 
a statesman ; but he seems to have measured, more 
accurately than others, the real forces of his time. 
Miss Martineau, in the remarkable paper published 
at the beginning of the war, says that every public 
man in the country with whom she talked agreed 
that silence upon slavery Avas the sole condition of 
preserving the Union. Sumner was the man who 
saw that silence would make the Union only the 
stately tomb of liberty ; and that speech, constant, 
unsparing, unshrinking, — speech ringing over a 
cowering land like an alarm-bell at midnight, — was 
the only salvation of the Union as the home of free- 
dom. 

A SURVEY OF HIS PUBLIC CAREER. 
If now, for a moment, we turn to survey that 
public career, extending over the thirty stormiest 



EULOGY BY GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 219 

years of our history, the one clear, conspicuous fact 
that appears in it, after the single devotion to one 
end, is, that Mr. Sumner lived to see that end accom- 
plished. He began by urging the Whig j)arty to 
raise the anti-slavery standard. It refused. He left 
the party, and presently it perished. He entered 
the Senate denouncing slavery in a manner that 
roused and strengthened the public mind for the 
contest that soon began. With the first gun of the 
war, he demanded emancipation as the way of 
victory ; and, when victory with emancipation came, 
he advocated equal suffrage as the security of 
liberty. What public man has seen more glorious 
fulfilments of his aims and efforts ? He did not, 
indeed, originate the laws that enacted the results ; 
but he developed the spirit and the conviction that 
made the results possible. William the Third won 
few battles, but he gained his cause ; Thomas 
Jefferson wrote the Declaration, but John Adams is 
the hero of American independence. Sumner was 
more a moral reformer than a statesman, and to a 
surprising degree events were his allies. But no 
man of our first great period, not Otis or Patrick 
Henry, nor Jefferson or Adams, nor Hamilton or 
Jay, is surer of his j^lace than in the second great 
period Charles Sumner is sure of liis. 

LATER EVENTS. 

As his career drew to an end, events occurred 
without which his life would not have been wholly 
complete, and the most signal illustration of the 



220 EULOGY BY GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

power of personal character in politics would liave 
been lost. He was, as I have said, a party man. 
Although always in advance, and by his genius a 
moral leader, lie had yet always worked with and l^y 
his party. But, as the main objects of his political 
activity were virtually accomplished, he came to be- 
lieve that-liis party, reckless in absolute triumph, 
was ceasing to represent that high and generous 
patriotism to which his life was consecrated ; that its 
moral tone was sensibly declining ; that it defended 
policies hostile to public faith and human rights, 
trusting leaders who should not be trusted, and 
tolerating practices that honest men should spurn. 
Believing that his party was forfeiting the confidence 
of the country, he reasoned with it, and appealed to 
it, as, more than twenty jeava before, he had reasoned 
with the Whig party in Faneuil Hall. His hope was 
by his speeches on the San Domingo treaty, and the 
French arms, and the presidential nomination, to 
shake what he thought to be the fatal apathy of the 
party, and to stimulate it once more to resume its 
leadership of the conscience and the patriotism of 
the country. It Avas my fortune to see him con- 
stantly and intimately during those days, to know 
the persuasions and flatteries lavished upon him to 
induce him to declare openly against the 2)arty, and 
his resolution not to leave it until he had exhausted 
every argument and prayer, and conscience forbade 
him to remain. That summons came, in his judg- 
ment, when a nomination Avas made which seemed 
to him the conclusive proof of a fatal party infatua- 



EULOGY BY GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 221 

tion. " Any thing else," he said to me vehemently, 
a hundred times, — "any other candidacy I can sup- 
port, and it would save the party and the country." 
The nomination was made. He did not hesitate. 
He was sixty years old; smitten with sorrows that 
were not known ; suffering at times acute agony 
from the disease of which he died ; his heart heavy 
with the fierce strife of a generation, and longing 
for repose. But the familiar challenge of duty 
found him alert and watchful at his post; and he 
advanced, without a doubt or a fear, to what was 
undoubtedly the greatest trial of his life. 

The anti-slavery contest, indeed, had closed many 
a door, and many a heart, against him ; it had exposed 
him to the sneer, the hate, the ridicule, of opposition ; 
it had threatened liis life, and assailed his person. 
But the great issue was clearly drawn ; his whole 
being was stirred to its depths ; he was in the bloom 
of youth, the pride of strength ; history and reason, 
the human heart and the human conscience, were his 
immortal allies ; and around him were the vast, in- 
creasing hosts of liberty, the men Avhose counsels he 
approved, the friends of Iris heart, the multitude 
that thought him only too eager for unquestionable 
rights, the prayer of free men and women, sustaining, 
inspiring, blessing him. But here was another scene, 
a far fiercer trial. His old companions in the Free- 
soil days, the great abolition leaders, most of his 
warmest personal friends, the great body of tlie party 
whom his words had inspired, looked at him with 
sorrowful surprise. Ah ! no one who did not know 

19* 



222 EULOGY BY GEORGE WILLIAM CUBTIS. 

that proud and tender heart, trusting, simple, almost 
credulous as that of a boy, could know how sore the 
trial was. He stood, among his oldest friends, vir- 
tually alone ; with inexpressible pain they parted, 
each to his own duty. " Are you willing," I said to 
him one day, when he had passionately implored me 
to agree with him, — and I should have been un- 
worthy his friendship had I been silent, — "is Charles 
Sumner willing at this time, and in the circumstances 
of to-day, to intrust the colored race in this coun- 
try, with all their rights, their liberty newly won, and 
yet flexile and nascent, to a party, however fair its 
profession, which comprises all who have hated and 
despised the negro ? The slave of yesterday in Ala- 
bama, in CaroUna, in Mississippi, — will his heart 
leap with joy, or droop dismayed, when he knows that 
Charles Sumner has given his great name as a club 
to smite the party that gave liim and his children 
their liberty ? " The tears started to his eyes, that 
good gray head boAved down ; but he answered sad- 
ly, " I must do my duty." And he did it. He saw 
the proud, triumphant party that he had led so often, 
men and women whom his heart loved, the trusted 
friends of a life, the sympathy and confidence and 
admiration upon which, on his great days, and after 
his resounding words, he had been joyfully accus- 
tomed to lean, — he saw all these depart ; and he 
turned to go on alone, and do his duty. 

Yet, great as was his sorrow, still greater, as I be- 
lieve, was his content in doing that duty. His State, 
indeed, could not follow him. For the fii-st time in 



EULOGY BY GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 223 

his life, he went one way, and Massachusetts went 
the other. But Massachusetts was as true to her 
convictions of duty in that hour as he was to his 
own. It was her profound behef that the result he 
sought would be perilous, if not fatal, to the welfare 
of the country. But the inspiring moral of these 
events is this, that while deploring his judgment in 
this single case, and while, later, the Legislature, mis- 
conceiving his noble and humane purpose, censured 
him for the resolutions which the people of the State 
did not understand, and which they believed, most 
unjustly to liim, to be somehow a wrong to the pre- 
cious dead, the flower of a thousand homes, — yet, 
despite all this, the great heart of Massachusetts 
never swerved from Charles Sumner. It was grieved 
and amazed, and could not forego its own duty be- 
cause he saw another. But I know that when in 
that year I spoke in rural Massachusetts, whether in 
public or in private, to those who, with me, could 
not follow him, nothing that I said was heard with 
more sympathy and applause than my declaration of 
undying honor and gratitude to him. " I seem to 
lean on the great heart of Massachusetts," he said, in 
the bitterest hour of the conflict of his life. And it 
never betrayed him. In that heart, not the least sus- 
picion of a mean or selfish motive ever clouded his 
image ; not a doubt of his absolute fidelity to his con- 
science disturbed its faith : and had he died a year 
ago, while yet the censure of the Legislature was un- 
repealed, his body would have been received by you 
with the same affectionate reverence ; here, and in 



224 EULOGY BY GEOEGE WTLLTAINI CURTTS. 

Faneuil Hall, and at the State House, all honor that 
boundless gratitude and admiration could lavish 
would have been poured forth ; and yonder at Mount 
Auburn he would have been laid to rest with the 
same immense tenderness of sorrow. 

THE LEGACY OF HIS LIFE. 

This is the great victory, the great lesson, the great 
legacy, of his life : that the fidelity of a public man 
to conscience, not to party, is rewarded with the sin- 
cerest popular love and confidence. What an inspi- 
ration to every youth longing with generous ambition 
to enter the great arena of the State, that he must 
heed first and alvvays the divine voice in his own soul, 
if he would be sure of the sweet voices of good fame ! 
Living, how Sumner served us! and dying, at this 
moment how he serves us still ! In a time when pol- 
itics seem peculiarly mean and selfish and corrupt, 
when there is a general vague apprehension that the 
very moral foundations of the national character are 
loosened, when good men are painfully anxious to 
know whether the heart of the people is hardened, 
Charles Sumner dies ; and the universality and sin- 
cerity of sorrow, such as the death of no man left liv- 
ing among us could awaken, show how true, how 
sound, how generous,. is still the heart of the Ameri- 
can people. This is the dying service of Charles 
Sumner, — a revelation which inspires every American 
to bind his shining example as a frontlet between the 
eyes, and never again to despair of the higher and 
more glorious destiny of his country. 



EULOGY BY GEORGE YTTLLTAIM CURTIS. 225 

And of that destiny what a foreshowing was he ! 
In that beautiful home at the sunny and leafy corner 
of the national city, where he lived among books and 
pictiu-es, and noble friendships, and lofty thoughts ; 
the home to which he returned at the close of each 
day in the Senate, and to which the wise and good 
from every land naturally came, — how the stately 
and gracious and all-accomplished man seemed the 
very personification of that new union for which he 
had so manfully striven, and whose coming his dying 
eyes beheld ; the union of ever wider liberty, and 
juster law, the America of comprehensive intelli- 
gence, and of moral power ! For that he stands ; up 
to that his imperishable memory, like the words of 
his living lips, forever lifts us, — lifts us to his own 
great faith in America and in man. Suddenly from 
his strong hand — my father, my father, the chariot 
of Israel, and the horsemen thereof ! — the banner 
falls. Be it ours to grasp it, and carry it still for- 
ward, still higher ! Our work is not his work, but 
it can be well done only in his spirit. And as, in the 
heroic legend of j'our western valley, the men of Had- 
ley, faltering in the fierce shock of Indian battle, sud- 
denly saw at their head the lofty form of an unknown 
captain, with white hair streaming on the wind, by 
his triumphant mien strengthening their hearts, and 
leading them to victory, so, men and women of Mas- 
sachusetts, of America, if in that national conflict al- 
ready begun, as vast and vital as the struggle of his 
life, the contest which is beyond that of any party, 
or policy, or measure, — the contest for conscience, 



22G EULOGY BY GEORGE WILLTAM CURTIS. 

intelligence, and morality as the supreme power in 
our politics, and the sole salvation of America, — you 
should falter or fail, suddenly your hearts shall see 
once more the towering form, shall hear again the 
inspiring voice, shall be exalted with the moral en- 
ergy and faith, of Charles Sumner ; and the victories 
of his immortal example shall transcend the triumphs 
of his life. 

The services closed with the singing of Mendel- 
ssohn's quartet, "Cast thy burden on the Lord," by 
Miss Kellogg, Miss Phillips, Mr. Fessenden, and 
Mr. Ryder. 



OEATION OF HON. EOBEET B. ELLIOTT. 

DELIVERED IN FANEUIL HALL. 



Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen, — The 
boon of a noble human life cannot be appropriated 
by any single nation or race. It is a part of the 
common wealth of the world, — a treasure, a guide, 
and an inspiration to all men, in all lands, and through 
all ages. The earthly activities of this life are cir- 
cumscribed by time and space ; but the divine and 
essential genius which informs and inspires that life 
is boundless in the sweep of its influence, and im- 
mortal in the energy of its activity. In the great 
All Hail Hereafter, in that mysterious and glorious 
future, which the heart of man, touched, as I firmly 
believe, by a divine intimation, is ever painting with 
more or less of conscious fondness, those mighty 
spirits, moving in new majesty and power on their 
great missions of Truth and Love, will have laid 
aside the limitations which fettered them here, and 
become the apparent and acknowledged leaders and 
voices of humanity itself. 

Charles Sumner, in his mortal limitations, was an 
American ; more narrowly, he was a Massachusetts 

227 



228 ORATION OF HON. ROBERT B. ELLIOTT. 

man ; more narrowly still, lie was a white man : but 
to-day what nation shall claim him, what State shall 
appropriate him, what race shall boast him ? He was 
the fair, consummate flower of humanity. He was 
the fruit of the ages. He was the cliikl of the past, 
and the promise of the future. The whole world, 
could it but know its relations, would mourn his 
departure, and mankind everywhere would join in 
his honors. 

But, fellow-citizens, if any fraction of humanity 
may claim a peculiar right to do honor to the mem- 
ory of this great common benefactor of the world, 
surely it is the colored race in these United States. 
To other men his services may seem only a vast 
accession of strength to a cause already moving with 
steady and assured advance : to us — to the colored 
race — he is, and ever will be, the great leader in politi- 
cal life, whose ponderous and incessant blows battered 
down the walls of our prison-house, and whose strong 
hand led us forth into the sunlight of freedom. I 
do not seek to appropriate him to my race ; but I do 
feel to-day that my race might almost bid the race to 
which by. blood he belonged, to stand aside while we, 
to whose welfare his life was so completely given, 
advance to do grateful honor to him who was our 
great benefactor and friend. " To the illustrious, 
the whole world is a sepulchre." To Charles Sum- 
ner, the whole civilized world has paid its honors ; and 
now we meet to give some formal testimony of our 
profound reverence for the 'personal gifts and pow- 
ers, for the measure of unselfish devotion, which he 
gave to U8. 



ORATION OF HON. ROBERT B. ELLIOTT. 229 

If I could, on this occasion, frame into articulate 
words the feelings of our hearts, if I could but half 
express the depth and sincerity of that gratitude 
which dwells in all our hearts, I might hope to rise 
to the height of the feeUngs of this hour. But 
that may not be. 

This is Faneuil Hall. Here, within this venerable 
shelter, so fitly styled " The Cradle of Liberty," a 
little more than twenty-eight years ago the voice of 
Charles Sumner was first heard in that great warfare 
to which his after life was so completely devoted. 
His tones were trumpet-like. Listen to them : " Let 
Massachusetts, then, be aroused. Let all her chil- 
dren be summoned to this holy cause. There are 
questions of ordinary politics in which men may 
remain neutral ; but neutrality now is treason to 
liberty, to humanity, and to the fundamental prin- 
ciples of free institutions. . . . Massachusetts 7nust 
continue foremost in the cause of freedom." 

Brave, glorious words ! But how few then to echo 
them ! Twenty-eight years only have passed ; and 
here, in that same Faneuil Hall, that prostrate race, 
against whose further enslavement Charles Sumner 
then thundered his protest and warning, have met 
beneath the protection of the laws not only of Massa- 
chusetts, but of the American Republic, to do honor 
to that splendid career, then and there begun, which 
witnessed the final overthrow of slavery, and the 
citizenship of its victims throughout the Republic. 

From that hour, in this hall, in November, 1845, 

20 



2o0 ORATION OF HON. ROBERT B. ELLIOTT. 

Charles Sumner may be said to have entered on his 
life-work. With what splendid equipments of mind, 
of heart, of body, did he advance to the conflict ! 
No knightlier figure ever moved forth to ancient 
jousts. No braver heart ever enhsted in freedom's 
cause. No scholarship more complete and affluent, 
since Milton, has placed its gifts and graces at the 
shrine of justice and public honor. 

He little dreamed, I have ventured to think, of the 
severity of the sacrifices, or the glory of the achieve- 
ments, which lay in the pathway on which he then 
entered. The mad and remorseless spirit of slavery 
which then aroused liis courage, and drew him to the 
conflict, moved steadily forward to its purposes. 
Texas was annexed ; the whole North, the entire 
national domain, was converted into the hunting- 
ground of slavery; but Charles Sumner was lifted by' 
Massachusetts into the Senate of the United States. 
The voice which had awakened the echoes of this his- 
toric hall in November, 1845, was transferred to that 
central point to rouse the sleeping conscience of the 
whole nation. With these vows, uttered likewise in 
this hall, he entered upon his august duties in the 
Senate : " To vindicate freedom, and oppose slavery, 
so far as I may constitutionally, with earnestness, 
and yet, I trust, without personal unkindness on my 
part, is the object near my heart. Would that my 
voice, leaving this crowded hall to-night, could trav- 
erse the hills and valleys of New England, that it 
could run along the rivers and lakes of my country, 
lighting in every heart a beacon-flame to arouse the 



ORATION OF HON. ROBERT B. ELLIOTT. 231 

slumbcrers throughout the land ! Others may become 
mdifferent to these principles, bartering them for 
political success, vain and short-lived, or forgetting 
the visions of youth in the dreams of age. When- 
ever I forget them, whenever I become indifferent to 
them, whenever I cease to be constant in maintaining 
them through good report and evil report, in any 
future combinations of party,- then may ' my tongue 
cleave to the roof of my mouth, may my right hand 
forget its cunning ' ! " 

From the hour he entered the Senate, the combat 
narrowed and deepened. The dreadful Fugitive-Slave 
Law hung its pall over the whole land. The spirit of 
slavery was omnipresent, ruling courts. Congress, 
churches. In all tliis fierce conflict, above the loudest 
din, ever sounded his courageous, clarion voice. 
What cause was ever honored by nobler efforts of 
research, of argument, of historical illustration, of 
classical adornments, of strong-hearted, resounding, 
and lofty eloquence ? But above all other utterances 
was the constant and conspicuous enunciation of the 
highest moral principles as applicable to all political 
action and duty. Hear him : " Sir, I have never been 
a politician. The slave of principles, I call no party 
master. B}' sentiment, education, and conviction, a 
friend of human rights in their utmost expansion, I 
have ever most sincerely embraced the democratic 
idea, — not, indeed, as rejjresented or professed by 
any party, but according to its real significance, as 
transfigured in the Declaration of Independence, and 
in the injunctions of Christianity. Amidst the vicis- 



282 ORATION OF HON. ROBERT p. ELLIOTT. 

situcles of public affairs, I shall hold fast always to 
this idea, and to any political party that truly em- 
braces it." 

With such sentiments planted, and cultivated into 
full growth and vigor, into the very soil of his moral 
nature, he presented himself to the country and the 
world in his first senatorial speech, in August, 1852, 
upon the repeal of the Fugitive-Slave Law. Reading 
that massive and noble argument again, in the light of 
twenty years of subsequent events, how difficult to 
realize the prodigious moral energy which it at once 
demanded and displayed ! The argument is ample 
and conclusive ; the historical proofs are abundant ; 
the eloquence is noble and aifecting ; but high above 
all rises the grandeur of the moral convictions which 
underlie and inspire all its wealth of argumentation 
and oratory. With proud and undaunted spirit he 
thus denounces that wicked enactment : " Sir, the 
slave act violates the Constitution, and shocks the 
public conscience. With modesty, and yet with 
firmness, let me add, sir, it offends against the divine 
laAv. 

" No such enactment is entitled to support. As 
the throne of God is above every earthly throne, so 
are his laws and statutes above all the laws and 
statutes of men. The mandates of an earthly power 
are to be discussed : those of Heaven must at once 
be performed; nor can we suifer ourselves to be 
drawn into any compacts in opposition to God." 
Words worthy, are they not, fellow-citizens, of the 
noblest of the martyrs and. confessors of any age ? 



ORATION OF HON. ROBERT B. ELLIOTT. 2C3 

One year before, bis faitbful friend Tbeodore Parker, 
a name ever sacred in tbe bearts of tbose wbo love 
freedom and trutb, bad written bim, " I bope you 
will build on tbe Rock of Ages, and look to eternity 
for your justification." How truly did be build on 
tbe Rock of Ages ! Yet, wbile be looked to eternity, 
time bas brougbt bim bis abundant justification. 

Upon tbe lofty arena of tbe Senate, be now strng- 
gled incessantly witb tbe intellectual gladiators wbom 
slavery ever bad as ber cbampions. Tbe beat and 
din of tbe conflict grew greater at every step. Yet 
tbere be stood, proud, defiant, uncomplaining, ag- 
gressive. How beavy tbe strain on bis great but 
sensitive nature, so finely cultured, bis words of 
acknowledgment of tbe cordial support which Mas- 
sachusetts ever gave him will attest. Hear him at 
Worcester : " After months of constant, anxious 
service in another place, away from Massachusetts, I 
am permitted to stand among you again, my fellow- 
citizens, and to draw satisfaction and strength from 
your generous presence. Life is full of change and 
contrast. From slave soil I have come to free soil. 
From tbe tainted breath of slavery, I have passed 
into the bracing air of freedom. And tbe heated 
antagonism of debate, shooting forth its fiery cinders, 
is changed into this brimming, overflowing welcome, 
while I seem to lean on tbe great heart of our be- 
loved Commonwealth, as it palpitates audibly in this 
croAvded assembly." 

A little later, slavery, in its rapid march, assailed 
the time-honored barrier which tbe compromise of a 

20* 



234 ORATION OF HON. ROBERT B. ELLIOTT. 

former generation had set up against its advance 
over our vast North-western territories. Mr. Sumner 
was now at the height of his powers. His age was 
forty-three ; his senatorial experience was such as to 
confirm his confidence in his own powers, and to 
concentrate upon him the confidence and admiration 
of the friends of freedom. History has been to me 
the delight and study of my hfe ; but I know of no 
figure in history which commands more of my ad- 
miration than that of Charles Sumner in the Senate 
of the United vStates, from the hour when Douglas 
presented his ill-omened measure for the repeal of 
the Missouri Compromise, until the blow of the 
assassin laid him low. Here was the perfection of 
moral constancy and daring. Here were sleepless 
vigilance, unwearying labor, hopefulness born only 
of deepest faith, buoyant resolution caring nothing 
for human odds, but serenely abiding in the perfect 
peace which the unselfish service of truth alone can 
bring. The issues then before the country awakened 
his profoundest alarm. The balance seemed to him 
to be about to pass from freedom to slavery. The 
American Republic, so solemnly dedicated by the 
fathers to freedom, seemed about to cut loose from 
all her ancient moorings. The imminence and great- 
ness of the danger oppressed him. Listen to these 
words, opening that speech which seems to me per- 
haps the most perfect of his life, in which he first 
opposed the removal of the landmark of freedom : 
" Mr. President, I approach this discussion with awe. 
The mighty question, with untold issues, oj)presses 



ORATION OF HON. ROBERT B. ELLIOTT. 235 

me. Like a portentous cloud, surcharged with irre- 
sistible storm and ruin, it seems to fill the whole 
heavens, making me painfully conscious how unequal 
to the occasion I am, — how unequal, also, is all that 
I can say to all that I feel." But hsten also to 
these words of lofty cheer which fitly close the same 
speech ; in which, rising on the wings of faith, he 
looks beyond the storm raging around him, and con- 
templates that purer and final " Union contemplated 
at the beginning, against which the storms of faction 
and the assaults of foreign power shall beat in vain, 
as upon the Rock of Ages ; and Liberty, seeking 
a firm foothold, will have at last whereon to 

STAND, AND MOVE THE WORLD." 

To such a man, to a faith so clear-sighted, to a 
spirit so faithful to God and his truth, no disaster or 
defeat, my fellow-citizens, can ever come. Victory 
sits forever on his triumphant crest. 

And, in his last final protest against that measure- 
less wrong, see how, from the oppression of tempo- 
rary defeat, he rises to joyous heights of serene moral 
confidence : " Sir, more clearly than ever before, I 
now penetrate that great future when slavery must 
disappear. Proudly I discern the flag of my country, 
as it ripples in every breeze, at last in reality, as in 
name, the flag of freedom, undoubted, pure, and 
irresistible. Sorrowfully I bend before the wrong 
you commit. Joyfully I welcome the promises of 
the future." 

But the sacred landmark of freedom, for which he 
pleaded, was ruthlessly swept away ; and, two years 



236 ORATION OF HON. ROBERT B, ELLIOTT. 

later, the country was convulsed by the outrages of 
the slave-power on the plains of Kansas. The con- 
flict raged equally in the halls of Congress, where 
slavery sought to gather the fruits of this great 
wrong by the organization of the Territory of Kansas 
as a slave State. 

Against this measure Charles Sumner uttered the 
magnificent philippic entitled so aptly " The Crime 
against Kansas ; " thus expressing, in a single phrase, 
the moral aspects and character of that whole pas- 
sage of history. 

In that speech he developed new powers of de- 
nunciation and invective. From the impressive 
exordium beginning, " Mr. President, you are now 
called to redress a great wrong," on through the 
ample statement, the exhaustive narrative, the irre- 
sistible argument, the fiery invective, the pathetic 
appeal, to those last words of the memorable perora- 
tion, " In the name of the heavenly Father, whose 
service is perfect freedom, I make this last appeal," 
he spoke with absolute fidelity to the convictions of 
his own heart, and of the aroused conscience of the 
free North. It was the full discharge, ay, the ex- 
plosion, of the slumbering volcano of moral indig- 
nation which slavery had aroused in thirty years of 
continuous and intolerable aggressions. It was the 
voice of the Declaration of Independence calhng back 
the recreant sons to the faith and practice of the 
fathers. It was, as Whittier said, " a grand and 
terrible philippic, worthy of the great occasion ; the 
severe and awful truth which the sharp agony of the 



ORATION OF HON. ROBERT B. ELLIOTT. 237 

national crisis demanded." It was more than a 
speech : it was an event. It was more than a half 
battle : it was a battle crowned with glorious victory. 
It was a scene and a speech to be compared only with 
the great triumphs of orator}^ — .Demosthenes plead- 
ing for Athenian liberty, Cicero thundering against 
the oppressor of Sicily, Burke arraigning the scourge 
of India. 

But why do I thus characterize that great utter- 
ance? Two days after its delivery, it received a 
demonstration of its quality and power more impres- 
sive and startling than any which attended the former 
masterpieces of human speech. Slavery, in the per- 
son of a representative in Congress from South 
Carolina, struck him to the floor, and covered him 
with murderous blows. It was, as another has elo- 
quently said, " our champion beaten to the ground 
for the noljlest word Massachusetts ever spoke in the 
Senate." 

The effect of this assault upon the fortunes of the 
two struggling powers — freedom and slavery — was 
significant. Each rushed to the support of its cham- 
pion. Brooks was hailed throughout the South as 
the chivalrous exponent of slavery ; while Charles 
Sumner ceased to be the assailant merely of slavery, 
and became the champion and martyr of free speech, 
and the sacred right of parliamentary debate. 

Alas — do we not still say alas ? — that " that noble 
head," as Emerson then said, "so comely and so 
wise, must be the target for a pair of bullies to beat 
with clubs ! " Yet that blood was precious testimo- 



238 ORATION OF HON. ROBERT B. ELLIOTT. 

ny for truth and freedom. In an instant the civilized 
world stood by the side of Sumner. What neither 
moral force, nor finished scholarship, nor command- 
ing eloquence could do, this final brutality achieved ; 
and from that day the hot and furious wrath of every 
freedom-loving heart fell upon that institution whose 
agent and representative had thus outraged humani- 
ty itself. America and Europe rang with a shout of 
horror. This historic hall echoed with fitting words 
of indignant eloquence. " It is," said one still living, 
" it is a blow not merely at Massachusetts, a blow 
not merely at the name and fame of our common 
country : it is a blow at constitutional liberty all the 
world over ; it is a stab at the cause of universal 
freedom. It is aimed at all men, everywhere, who 
are struggling for what we now regard as our great 
birthright, and which we intend to transmit unim- 
paired to our latest posterity. . . . Forever, forever 
and aye, that stain will plead in silence for liberty, 
wherever man is enslaved, for humanity all over the 
world, for truth and for justice, now and forever." 

Months and years of bodily suffering followed this 
outrage ; borne, as all his life's experiences were borne, 
with unsurpassed fortitude, but with longings inex- 
pressible for a return to the activities and dangers of 
the conflict in which he was now the central figure. 
While recalling this devotion of her great senator, 
let me not forget to pay a tribute to that generous and 
true Commonwealth which he so truly represented. 
If Charles Sumner was faithful, so was Massachusetts. 
The proud State felt, and felt truly, that his vacant 



ORATION OF HON. ROBERT B. ELLIOTT. 239 

chair was her truest representative until he to 
whom it belonged should re-occupy it. While still 
prostrated, and unable to resume his duties, ]\Iassa- 
chusetts, by a vote approaching unanimity, re-elected 
him as her senator, — State and senator, true to each 
other, worthy of each other. 

But while resting among the Alleghanies of our 
own country, or seeking health on foreign shores, his 
heart w^as never absent from the great cause. What 
tributes do his brief utterances bear to the un- 
wavering fidelity of his soul ! Speaking to a sympa- 
thizing friend, he says, " Oh, no ! My suffering is 
little, in comparison with daily occurrences. The 
poorest slave is in danger of worse outrages every 
moment of his life." Again he writes, to the young 
men of Fitchburg, "We have been 'told that the 
' duties of life are more than life ; ' and I assure you 
that the hardest part of my present lot is the enforced 
absence from public duties, and especially from that 
seat, where, as a senator from Massachusetts, it is 
my right, and also my strong desire, at this moment, 
to be heard." 

Again he writes, "With sorrow inexpressible I 
am constrained to all the care and reserve of an in- 
valid. More than four months have passed since you 
clasped my hand as I lay bleeding in the Senate- 
chamber. This is hard, very hard, for me to bear ; 
for I long to do something, at tliis critical moment, 
for the cause. What is life worth without action? " 

Again, while lingering at Savoy, subjected to daily 
treatment by fire, he writes, " It is with a pang un- 



210 ORATION OF HON. ROBERT B. ELLIOTT. 

speakable that I find myself thus arrested in tlie 
labors of life, and in the duties of my position. This 
is harder to bear than the fire." 

No testimonies of this noble life will be more pre- 
cious tlian these longings of this great heart for the 
duties of his position. 

• At last, on the 4th of June, 1860, he was permitted 
to re-enter upon those scenes of senatorial debate 
from which, four years before, he had been so cruelly 
Avithdrawn. Butler and Brooks Avere both dead. 
The memories of Ms outrage and sufferings must have 
filled his mind. Yet see how he puts* by all personal 
considerations, and remembers only the cause for 
which he is to speak : " Mr. President, I have no 
j)ersonal griefs to utter : only a vulgar egotism could 
intrude such into this chamber. I have no personal 
wrongs to avenge : only a brutish nature could at- 
tempt to wield that vengeance which belongs to the 
Lord. The years that have intervened, and the 
tombs that have opened, since I spoke, have their 
voices, which I cannot fail to hear. Besides, what 
am I, what is any man among the living or among 
the dead, compared with the question before us ? " 

With these simple and yet pathetic allusions, he 
commenced that most exhaustive delineation of the 
spirit, methods, and effects of slavery, which, under 
its singularly felicitous title, " The Barbarism of 
Slavery," will remain a monument of research, of 
invective, and of impassioned eloquence. 

From this tune the great drama moved rapidly to 
its catastrophe. The slave-power writhed beneath 



ORATION OF HON. EOBERT B. ELLIOTT. 241 

the effect of this awful arraignment at the bar of the 
'world's judgment. It saw in secession from the 
Union, and the establishment of a separate slavehold- 
ing confederacy, its only hope and safety. Abraham 
Lincoln became president ; and in April, 1861, the 
bombardment of Fort Sumter, in Charleston harbor, 
sounded the tocsin of civil war throughout the land. 
Into that struggle Charles Sumner entered without 
hesitation and without alarm. His only anxiety had 
been to keep the North clear of the deadly spirit of 
compromise. Let justice be done him here. His 
moral equilibrium and courage were never more con- 
s^Dicuous. Many had joined him in his fierce assaults 
on slavery, who now shrunk back fi'om the gulf of 
war and disunion which seemed to open before them. 
Compromises were suggested on all sides, — com- 
promises, too, which would have robbed freedom of 
all her advantage, and left the slave to his hopeless 
bondage. Let no negro forget — nay, let no Ameri- 
can forget — that Charles Sumner never sullied his 
lips with degrading compromise. 

Duty was his master ; justice ruled him ; and to 
every suggestion of compromise with slavery he re- 
sponded, " Get thee behind me, Satan ! " 

His inflexible spnit may be seen in these words 
to Gov. Andrew : " Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes. 
Don't let these words be ever out of your mind, when 
you think of any proposition from the slave-masters. 
TJiei/ are all essentially false, ivitli treason in their 
hearts, if not on their tongues. How can it be other- 
wise ? Slavery is a falsehood, and its supporters are 

21 



242 ORATION OF HON. EOBEET B. ELLIOTT. 

all perverted and changed. Punic in faith, Punic in 
character, you are to meet all that they do or say 
with denial or distrust. I know these men, and see 
through their plot. The time has not yet come to 
touch the chords which I wish to awaken. But I see 
my way dear. O God! Let Massachusetts keep 
true. It is all I ask." 

Again to the same friend he writes, " IMore than 
the loss of forty forts, arsenals, or the national capi- 
tal, I fear the loss of our principles. . . . Keep firm, 
and do not listen to any proposition." 

Fellow-citizens, I am a negro, — one of the victim 
race. My heart bows in gratitude to every man who 
struck a blow for the liberty of my race. But how 
can I fail to remember that alone, alone, of all the 
great leaders of our cause at Washington, Charles 
Snmner kept his faith to freedom stern and true? 
What measure of honor shall we not pay to liim 
Avhose only prayer, amidst -the abounding clangers of 
that hour, was, " O God ! let Massachusetts keep 
true " ? Lincoln, Seward, Adams, — eulogy even can- 
not claim such absolute fidelity for either of them. 
History, I venture to predict, will point to this pas- 
sage in the life of Charles Sumner as the highest i)roof 
of the superior and faultless tone of his moral nature. 
What a majestic moral figure ! Let us bear it in our 
hearts as the crowning gift and glory of his life. 

But humanity swej)t onward ; timid compromisers 
were overwhelmed by the logic of events; and at 
last God held this great nation face to face with its 
duty. The death-grapple rocked and agonized the 



ORATION OF HON. ROBERT B. ELLIOTT. 243 

land. Released from the Delilah bands of compro- 
mise, the Samson of the North resumed and re-asserted 
his resistless strength. In the van of every effort and 
policy which sought the overthrow of slavery, or the 
triumph of freedom, was Charles Sumner. " Eman- 
cipation our best Weapon," is the inspiriting title 
of a speech bearing so early a date as Oct. 1, 1801. 
" Welcome to Fugitive Slaves " was a senatorial 
utterance of Dec. 4, 1861. With tireless indus- 
try working in all directions, —in legislation for the 
support of our armies, for maintaining our public 
credit, in inspiring the president to his full duty, 
in guarding our relations with other nations, above 
all, in saving the nation fi-om the fatal mistake of 
Mr. Lincoln's Louisiana scheme of reconstruction, he 
sustained, encouraged, vindicated, and ennobled the 
national cause. 

The triumph of the national arms in the spring of 
1865 threw upon the National Government the un- 
paralleled task of re-establishing civil government in 
the rebellious States. The work of destruction was 
ended, and the work of rebuilding must be begun. 
The ill-advised and ill-starred attempts of Andrew 
Johnson complicated the problem already bristling with 
difiiculties, constitutional and legal, and beset with 
dangers, political and moral. The moral intrepidity 
and prescience of Mr. Sumner was earliest to detect 
the false pobtical theories which then so widely pre- 
vailed. With wonted boldness he denounced the 
presidential scheme of reconstruction, and summoned 
Congress and the country to its duty. In a 'series 



244 ORATION OF HON. KOBEET B. ELLIOTT. 

of senatorial efforts he proclaimed and emphasized in 
the ear of the nation the paramount duty of guard- 
ing the results of the war by "irreversible constitu- 
tional guaranties." Especially did he denounce the 
injustice and wickedness of any settlement which left 
the colored race of the South under the hands of 
their former masters. This was an axiom in his 
arguments, the postulate of his reasonings. From 
this starting-point he readily reached that conclusion, 
finally accepted by the country, and enacted into our 
national laws and Constitution, that the colored race 
must be made citizens of the United States, and 
voters in their respective States. The Declaration 
of Independence, with its lofty and immortal truth, 
" All men are created free and equal," was 
to him a clear and constant guide. In this grand 
p-erminal truth he saw the only true and final rule of 
government; and he pressed towards its practical 
realization with eager and unfaltering steps. He 
had heard this sacred tenet of the fathers flouted in 
the Senate as a "self-evident lie ;" but he only bore 
it the more proudly and conspicuously on his shield 
until he could gratefully say, " The Declaration of 
Independence, so lately a dishonored tradition, is 
now the rubric and faith of the Republic." God be 
praised ! he found at last that " Unioji, where Libert^/, 
seeking a firm footliold, might have tvhereon to standi 
and move the worlds 

Once only, in all this splendid and faithful career, 
did Charles Sumner part company with the great 
mass of the friends of freedom ; and on this he needs 
no silence. 



ORATION OF HON. ROBERT B. ELLIOTT. 245 

Differing, as I could not but differ, from his judg- 
ment in the last national campaign, I point to it 
to-day as one of the highest proofs of his utter devo- 
tion to the call of duty. Still was he true, utterly 
true, to his convictions, to the commanding voice of 
conscience. He had been faithful in defeat : could 
he be faithful in success ? Draw no veil of silence 
over this passage, but write it high on his monu- 
ment, — that in old age, when the weary frame 
longed for rejDose, he could again brace himself for 
the conflict in which nearly'all the friends of a life- 
time stood arrayed against him. 

' ' Nothing is here for tears ; nothing to wail, 
Or knock the breast; no weakness, no contempt, 
Displ'aise, or blame; nothing but well and fair." 

As his life was wholly consecrated to duty, so his 
death was wanting in no element of moral grandeur. 
He fell with armor on, with face still inflexibly turned 
towards present duties, fronting eternity with the 
simple trust which God gives to his faithful servant. 
With no vague dread or anxiety concerning the 
future, he bore his earthly cares and duties to the 
threshold of eternity, and laid down the burdens of 
life only at the feet of his divine Master. "• Don't 
let my Civil-rights Bill fail," was his fitting adieu 
to earth, and greeting to heaven. 

Fellow-citizens, the life of Charles vSuraner needs 
no interpreter. It is an open, illuminated page. The 
ends he aimed at were always high ; the means he 
used were always direct. Neither deception nor 

21* 



246 ORATIOiSr OF HON. ROBERT B. ELLIOTT. 

indirection, neither concealment nor disguise of any 
kind or degree, had place in his nature or metheds. 
By open means he sought open ends. He walked in 
.the sunlight, and wrote his heart's inmost purpose on 
his forehead. 

His activity, and capacity of intellectual labor, were 
almost unequalled. Confined somewhat, by the over- 
shadowing nature of the anti-slavery cause, in the 
range of his topics, he multiphed his blows, and 
redoubled the energy of liis assaults upon that great 
enemy of his country's peace. Here his vigor knew 
no bounds. He laid all ages and lands uirder contri- 
bution. Scholarship in all its walks, history, art, 
literature, science, — all these he made his aids and 
servitors. 

But who does not see that these are not his glory ? 
He was a scholar among scholars ; an orator of con- 
summate power ; a statesman famihar with the struc- 
ture of governments, and the social forces of the 
world. But he was greater and better than one or all 
of these : he was a 7nan of absolute moral rectitude of 
purpose ayid of life. His personal purity was perfect, 
and unquestioned everywhere. He carried morals 
into politics. And this is the greatness of Charles 
Sumner, — that, by the power of his moral enthusiasm, 
he rescued the nation from its shameful subservience 
to the demands of material and commercial interests, 
and guided it up to the high plane of justice and 
right. Above his other great qualities, towers that 
moral greatness to which scholarship, oratory, and 
statesmanship are but secondary and insignificant. 



i 



OKATION OF HON. ROBERT B. ELLIOTT. 247 

He Avas just because lie loved justice ; he was right 
beoause he loved right. Let this be his record and 
epitaph. 

To have lived such a life were glory enough. 
Success was not needed to perfect its star-bright, im- 
mortal beauty. But success came. What amazing 
contrasts did his life witness ! He heard the hundred 
guns which Boston fired for the passage of the 
Fugitive-Slave Act ; and he saw Boston sending forth, 
with honors and blessings, a regiment of fugitive 
slaves to save that Union which the crime of her 
Webster had imperilled. He saw Franklin Pierce 
employing the power of the natix)n to force back one 
helpless fugitive to the hell of slavery ; and he saw 
Abraham Lincoln write the edict of emancipation. 
He heard Taney declare that the black man had no 
rights which the white man was bound to respect ; 
and he welcomed Revels to his seat as a senator of 
the United States. 

But, as defeat could not damp his ardor, so success 
could not al)ate his zeal. He fell while bearing aloft 
the same banner of human rights, which, twenty- 
eight years before, he had unfurled and lifted in this 
hall. 

The blessings of the poor are his laurels. One 
sacred thought — duty — presided over his life, in- 
spirmg him in youtb, guiding him in manhood, 
strengthening him in age. Be it ours to walk by 
the light of this pure example. Be it ours to copy 
his stainless integrity, his supreme devotion to 
humanity, his profound faith in truth, and his uncou- 
qucrable moral enthusiasm. 



248 ORATION OF HON. ROBERT B. ELLIOTT. 

Adieu, great servant and apostle of liberty! If 
others forget thee, thy fame shall be guarded by the 
millions of that emancipated race whose gratitude 
shall be more enduring than monumental marble or 
brass. 



EULOGIES IN U. S. CONGRESS. 

IN THE SENATE. 



BY HON. GEORGE S. BOUTWELL. 

laniEDiATELY after the reading of the journal, Mr. 
Boutwell of Massachusetts rose, and said, that, in 
accordance with the notice previously given, he now 
submitted to the Senate the following resolutions, 
and asked their consideration : — 

Resolved, By the Senate, that as an additional mark of re- 
spect to the memory of Charles Sumner, long a senator from 
Massachusetts, business be now suspended, that the friends and 
associates of the deceased may pay fitting tribute to his public 
and private virtues. 

Resolved, That the secretary of the Senate communicate these 
resolutions to the House of Representatives. 

The resolutions were agreed to ; and then Mr. 
Boutwell delivered his eulogy, as follows : — 

The time that has passed since the death of Mr. 
Sumner has assuaged the bitterness of our grief ; but 
the first feeling of sadness rests with undiminished 
weight upon every heart. Here, and by us, more 

249 



250 EULOGIES IN U. S. CONGEESS. 

tlian elsewhere, and by others, his presence will he 
missed. For nearly twenty-three years he was a 
member of the Senate, and for a considerable pe- 
riod its senior. To all of us he was an acquaint- 
ance, and to many of us an intimate friend. To the 
cultivated classes of Europe and America, he was 
known as a ripe scholar ; a sincere pliilanthropist ; 
an ardent and consistent lover of liberty, and defender 
of the right ; an experienced statesman, trained espe- 
cially in English and American constitutional liistory, 
and the traditions, genius, and practice of European 
and American diplomacy ; a lover of art ; an orator, 
fully equijDped, according to the requirements men- 
tioned by Cicero, for the forum in which liis maturer 
years were spent ; and, more than all, a man of pure 
.purposes in private and public affairs. For nearly 
twenty-five years I enjoyed his acquaintance, and 
for more than half that period his intimate friend- 
ship. Forgetting, for the moment, my relations to 
him, it is to be said that his friendships were first 
moral and intellectual, to which he added with a 
liberal hand the civilities, amenities, and blessings 
of cultivated social life. He came to the Senate not 
only as the representative of the Commonwealth 
of Massachusetts, but as the rciDresentative of an 
idea to which the State was even then already 
pledged. The men who suj^ported him in 1831 
were, with a few exceptions, his supporters in 18")7, 
1868, and 18G9. INIr. Sumner was at times in ad- 
vance of the people of the State ; but in his hostility 
to the institution of slavery, in his efforts for its 



EULOGIES IN U. S. CONGRESS. 251 

abolition, and the reconstruction of the government 
upon the basis of freedom, he never misrepresented 
Massachusetts. In the cause of hberty, he was apos-. 
tie, martyr, and finaliy conqueror. In this cause, 
and by nature as well, he was self-reliant, self-assert- 
ing, and aggressive ; and therefore his life, as he 
often said, was a life of controversy. His nature was 
imperious, and he made little allowance for the diver- 
sities among men ; and often he dealt harshly with 
those who opposed, or failed to accept, his views. It 
is, however, a happy memory for his friends and 
countrymen, that, after his return from Europe, he 
had only kind words for all, even for those with 
whom he had most differed upon personal and j^ublic 
questions. 

First of all, Mr. Sumner was devoted to liberty ; 
not to English liberty, or to American liberty, but 
to liberty. He accepted, in their fullest meaning, 
the words of Kossuth, " Liberty is liberty, as God is 
God." In his efforts to establish liberty in America, 
he gave a free construction to the original Consti- 
tution, for the purpose of securing right and justice 
to all who were within its jurisdiction ; and the 
powers of a constitution may well he construed lib- 
erally in the cause of right and justice, but tli-ey 
can never be too much circumscribed in the service 
of wrong and oppression. There are limitations to 
every form of human greatness. Mr. Sumner was 
a follower of ideas. A general declaration is the 
fullest expression of ideas ; and Mr. Sumner was 
inclined to trust general declarations, and to embody 



252 EULOGIES IN U. S. CONGRESS. 

them in the Constitution and laws. Institutions are 
often unsatisfactory when tested by the ideas they are 
designed to represent. I speak rather of what has 
been, than of our hopes of the future. Our own 
Constitution is now a near approach to the Declara- 
tion of Independence; and we may anticipate the 
time when local governments and independent na- 
tions, in the discharge of their duties and the exer- 
cise of their powers, will conform practically to the 
best ideas of justice and peace. Mr. Sumner was 
impatient of delay ; and hence he accepted reluc- 
tantly those amendments to the Constitution which 
to others seemed sufficient for the protection of per- 
sonal and public rights. It is, therefore, to be ad- 
mitted, that in the business of government, and 
for the time in which he lived, Mr. Sumner was not 
always a practical statesman. The world is usually 
too busy to concern itself with the men of the past, 
unless they have special claims to consideration. 
The immortal few, in politics and government, are 
those who have led in proceedings in which men of 
all times are interested. The American Revolution 
gave a few such names to the country and the 
world : the contest for the overthrow of slavery 
added others. Among these, we may venture to 
place Charles Sumner, whose labors, fidelitj^, and 
sufferings can never be omitted from the history 
of the contest. As its influence widens and deepens, 
in the current of universal human life, the services 
of the men engaged in it will be more appreciated 
throughout the world. The blow struck at slavery 



EULOGIES IN U. S. CONGRESS. 2')S 

in America will prove as effectual against slavery in 
every other country. While slavery existed with 
us, and suffrage was hmited, and the truths of the 
Declaration of Independence were not realized in 
the government, monarchies and aristocracies had 
a defence in the admitted failure of the great Repub- 
lic. That defence is now taken away ; and, one after 
another, personal and class governments must fall. 
Thus will Mr. Sumner justly claim consideration in 
other lands, and from future times. There is, how- 
ever, an immortality not personal, which is even 
more enduring. The power of a great hfe, of a supe- 
rior human intellect, spreads far beyond the knowl- 
edge of names, and is transmitted to generations 
that have no means of tracing the influences to their 
source. These influences become woven into the 
civilization, literature, and politics of nations, control 
their fortunes, shape then' destinies, and work out 
good or evil results of the most important character. 
It cannot be denied, that, in the efforts made by 
Mr. Sumner in behalf of human liberty and universal 
peace, he has given new force to the most benign 
influences ; or that his power, mingled with numer- 
ous other contributions of the past, present, and the 
future, will contribute to the general welfare of the 
human race. But, whether his name be remembered 
or forgotten, his power will continue. When a per- 
son has disappeared from the stage of human action, 
his name, even if known to future generations, is 
of little consequence to them : the influence of his 
life is all of value that remains. Thus has Mr. Sum- 

22 



254 Ein.oGiES IN u. s. congress. 

iier bound himself to liis countrymen of two races, 
and to the civiUzed workl, by cords that may be 
traced through the ages as long as justice shall find 
defenders, or the divine spirit of liberty shall animate 
mankind. But these thoughts relate to the uncertain 
future. We are called, in the present, to accept 
the solemn truth, that the death of Charles Sumner 
is a signal loss to the Senate and the people of 
the United States, alleviated, in some degree, by the 
belief that his life, character, and public services, 
especially in favor of human liberty and universal 
peace, will ever be held in grateful remembrance 
by his countrymen, and the knowledge thereof 
transmitted to posterity as an example for future 
venerations. 



BY HON. J. S. MORRILL. 

Mr. President, — Here our numbers are not so 
large, nor our differences of any sort so great, that 
we do not feel, when death enters this chamber, 
something of the bereavement of a broken family 
circle. Associated here for a prolonged term of 
years, often including the prime and ripest portion of 
our lives, statedly meeting in the workshops of com- 
mittees and in daily debate, hearing our names 
repeated in the frequent roll-calls, it is not strange 
that it should give our hearts a pang to part with 
the huml)lest name when it passes away forever to 



EULOGIES IN U. S. CONGRESS. 255 

tlie " stany court of eternity." But now, when we 
part with a conspicuous member of the Senate, — 
conspicuous by length of service, by eminent ability, 
and established renown, — each one of us must con- 
fess to more or less of a personal loss as well as to 
the greater loss of the Senate itself. Charles Sum- 
ner, under the higher law, has responded to the 
last roll-call ; and here the familiar sound of his 
voice is forever silenced. His imposing presence 
on the crowning outer circle of the Senate will no 
longer attract attention. Only the memory remains 
to us of one whose words and bearing, with minor 
qualifications, so well comported with the dignity 
of his office as to have fairly earned the title of a 
model senator. 

Mr. Sumner for four years had been a member of 
the Senate when it was my fortune, in 1855, first to 
hold a seat in the House of Representatives. For 
words spoken in debate, in 1856, he was brutally 
assaulted by Preston S. Brooks, a member of the 
House ; and it was not until after this that my per- 
sonal acquaintance with him began. For some years 
I was more familiar with what was then known as 
his " vacant chair " than with the senator to whom 
it belonged, who was abroad, ready to invoke heroic 
remedies, if only they led to health. During these 
years he returned for a short period, but bore little 
or no part in the Senate. Mr. Brooks, meanwhile, 
suddenly died, as at last, and after intervals of pain- 
ful suffering has, also suddenly, the victim of his 
violence. It was noticeable, in his social intercourse, 



256 EULOGIES IN U. S. CONGRESS. 

wliile others let slip an occasional outburst of feeling 
as to his assailant, Mr. Sumner never disclosed the 
least lingering personal animosity. History was 
silently left to avenge itself. His misfortune ap- 
peared to be accepted as one of the many inseparable 
wrongs resulting from the cruel system of slavery, 
with which only he waged enduring battle, and not 
as the crime of an mdividual with whom, living or 
dead, he sought only peace. 

The Senate of the United States is no ordinary 
theatre in which men sustain their parts. It is the 
forum of States. If the seat which, in 1851, Mr. 
Sumner was called to fill had been previously occu- 
pied by an undistinguished person, his task would 
have been comparatively easy ; but . that seat had 
been long held by one the world pronounced the 
foremost American senator, made classic by one the 
breadth and grandeur of whose services, whose elo- 
quence and statesmanship, with that of his compeers, 
had placed the American Senate on a level with that 
of the Roman Republic in the days of its greatest 
virtue, and highest splendor. He succeeded, after a 
brief interlude, the veteran " Defender of the Con- 
stitution," who had stamped upon om- banner the 
ineifaceable words, " Union and liberty, now and 
forever, one and inseparable." To say that he proved 
not an unworth}^ successor of Webster, however un- 
like, is to say much, considering he was but a tyro 
in the politics of even the Commonwealth from 
whence he came. It was the fortune of Charles 
Sumner to be placed in his high station at a period 



EULOGIES IN U. S. COKGRESS. 2,' 7 

of grand and rapidly-culminating events. Blessed 
with exalted natural gifts, lie also had been furnished 
with a large share of the erudition of the age, com- 
pleted by such graces as foreign travel supplies. 
Having already started in the field with a small band 
of early crusaders against slavery, impelled by a 
robust frame, and more robust will, he fearlessly 
seized upon every fit occasion, in his new position, to 
make that institution odious, and, if possible, to 
wound it in some of its most vulnerable parts. This 
was his all-absorbing mission. 

He received and revered the Constitution of our 
country, as ordained by the same will and power 
which proclaimed the great Magna Charta of human 
freedom, the Declaration of Independence ; and, there- 
fore, never forgot the fundamental idea of " equality 
before the law," nor that " all men are created equal." 
He brought no fixed allegiance to party platforms, 
and found no withes in the Constitution that re- 
strained him from resisting any claims for the pro- 
tection of slavery ; but that instrument was every- 
where to be interpreted broadly and beneficently, in 
the interests of humanity, world-wide and divinely 
free. 

Bestowing care even upon trifles, his orations in 
the Senate, as might be expected, were prepared as 
for a grand occasion ; and, towering in his place like 
a tribune of the people, the heavy, resounding tones 
of his voice were wont to draw the attention of will- 
ing listeners to words which soon found through the 
press a far wider acceptance. His arguments were 

22* 



258 EULOGIES IN U. S. CONGRESS. 

methodical, abundant in information, stiffened by apt 
and pregnant sentences, studiously observant of the 
syllogistic beginning, middle, and end ; and though 
rarely what is called brilliant, or illumined by wit, 
were always clearly put forth with the paramount 
object of spreading light, and with the convmcing 
majesty of earnestness. 

Those among us who may have found it sometimes 
difficult to agree with him never found it difficult to 
respect his fairness of purpose, his unflinching in- 
tegrity, or his wealth of learning. In his orbit as a 
statesman, he soared high from the beginning to the 
end, and ever sought, with moral intrepidity, noble 
ends by noble means. As to the largest share of legis- 
lative measures, he was apt to be right. He sturdily 
and sorrowfully resisted the banishment of coin, as 
an alien, from the base of a sound currency. 
Upon questions of popular rights he was often a 
leader : in all steps of reform he was never a laggart. 
The doctrines he espoused, if not exclusively his 
o'wn, appeared to belong to him by the possessory 
title of constant use and earnest adherence. He 
needed no admonition to " stick." If it cannot prop- 
erly be claimed that " his doctrines persuaded one 
generation, and live to govern the next," it may be 
claimed that his early text of " Freedom national, 
slavery sectional," did not wait until the next gene- 
ration to be even more than verified. Freedom is 
national, and slavery forever extinct. In the surging 
conflicts in behalf of universal liberty, the deceased 
senator has gathered many laurels ; and, if few more 



EULOGIES IN U. S. CONGRESS. 259 

remained to be won, his brow was abeady covered. 
He will be numbered among those who helped to 
change a great chapter in our history. By a life of 
unstinted and unselfish labor, he secured the undying 
gratitude of an emancipated race, and the general 
approval of mankind. 

Mr. Sumner was ever surrounded by books. They 
were his most beloved friends, and svirrendered many 
of their secret treasures to their constant wooer. 
New books as well as old, Longfellow as well as 
Plato and Milton, often robbed him of sleep. He 
was a somewhat fastidious' lover of the beautiful in 
art, Ijusily collecting such notable objects as were 
historically rare, superb in material, or cunning in 
worlananship ; but neither this elegant refinement of 
taste, nor the epicurean seclusion of his daily life, 
lifted him above willing labor, and the tenderest 
sympathy, for those who were rude, unlettered, and 
degraded by even the darkest-browed slavery. To 
him the "Greek Slave "in marble appeared trans- 
cendently beautiful ; but the chain, the ugly system, 
that chafed the limbs, and bound the living slave, 
was an intolerable atrocity, even a manacle on the 
symbol of God. 

Mr. Sumner's habits of industry, though the sands 
of his fourth term as senator were fast running out, 
clung to him to the very last ; and in no tlii-ee months 
of his life were they much better displayed, nor rest 
and pastime more habitually scorned, than in those 
which brought his labors to an end. 

Most men have some specialty wherein they chieily 



260 EULOGIE^'. IN TJ. S. CONGRESS. 

excel ; and, doubtless, the great subject of the natural 
rights of man most deeply excited the enthusiasm of 
Charles Sumner. But he brought valuable contribu- 
tions into the discussion of a wide field of topics, 
pohtical and historical ; and upon international law, 
it may not be wrong to say, he was possibly more 
profoundly learned than upon the subject which 
most contributed to build up and support his repu- 
tation. Few men have done more work, and fewer 
still have done it so well. While chairman of the 
Committee on Foreign Relations, in all critical 
emergencies he was a vigilant and powerful friend 
of peace, and as such merits the country's grateful 
remembrance. The principle embodied in our late 
treaty • with Great Britain, of the arbitration of 
international differences, he eagerly accepted as 
the herald of peace to future generations, in 
harmony with his earhest idea of the " True Gran- 
deur of Nations," and as a hopeful sign of human 
progress. 

Public men during life very often receive the poor- 
est kind of thanks for their noblest efforts. The 
world at large is not always swift to comprehend ; 
associates look on with torpid indifference ; and ene- 
mies are made glad by every new field exposed to 
assault. But, when the grave closes the scene, praise 
of the dead harms no rival ; and the final verdict of 
history proclaims only truth, generously, perhaps, 
but free from detraction and all uncharitableness ; 
and then public men who have deserved well of their 
country obtain that full measure of recognition and 



EULOGIES IN U. S. CONGRESS. 261 

reverence which at hxst confers merited rank in the 
roll of the worthiest of mankind. 

The present age, however, always suffers, at all 
points, by contrast Avith the past, because none but 
the great among the unnumbered hosts turned to 
dust, the few screened and idolized products of 
picked centuries, have been preserved ; while all of 
the present age are visible, and so near that no 
deformities can be hidden. There is no sun, that 
has not long ceased to shine, whose spots remain 
unrevealed. 

Our deceased associate, unsheltered by wealth, by 
family, or by party, was exposed,, first and last, to 
much adverse criticism, from v/hich, in spite of much 
real admiration, impartiality will not now wholly 
release him. His persistency in pushing his own 
measures to the front, though to their present hurt 
or to the hurt of others, often provoked rebuke. His 
enemies he easily forgave, but could not so easily 
bury the slender personal* affi'onts received, in any 
wordy encounters, from his peers. His self-confidence, 
admirable enough when he was right, was no less 
unmistakable and glittering when he happened to l)e 
wrong. To his -conclusions, sincerely reached, he 
gave regal pretensions, and for them accepted noth- 
ing less than unconditional submission. Uncon- 
scious of personal offence, he imperiously, and with 
the stride of a colossus, trampled down whatever 
arguments stood in his way, not knowing who was 
bruised ; and yet was sometimes so sensitive, that, 
if his own arguments were touched by the gentlest 



2G2 EULOGIES IN U. S. CONGRESS. 

zephyrs of personal retort, he felt they were visited 
too roughly. 

Yet these occasional self-assertions by no means 
held general sway, and never at his own house and 
table ; where the cordial greeting, and genial smile, 
with conversation embroidered with both wisdom 
and mirth, exhibited the full and varied attractions 
of his head and heart. 

Finally, deducting whatever truth may demand, — 
a stern deduction the deceased never omitted, — the 
brightness of his fame will not serve to perpetuate 
the memory of any stain upon the absolute purity 
of his ]3i"ivate or public character ; and there will still 
remain the imperishable records of a memorable 
career, — something that the highest ambition aims 
to grasp, and lieroes die to obtain, — or much of tlie 
real elements of greatness, and all the glory of an 
historic name. 

" I Hve in the hope of a better world, a world with 
a little less friction," are words I have seen attributed 
to the departed senator. Has he not, with no duty 
neglected, reached that " better world " ? And who 
of us does not sometimes pray for "a world with a 
little less friction " ? 



BY HON. A. A. SARGENT. 

Me,. President, — It was my privilege a few 
weeks since, by your appointment, to stand, with 
a few of our brother senators, at the grave of 



EULOGIES IN U. S. CONGRESS. 263 

the late Senator Charles Sumner, while his earthly 
remains were being de2:»osited in the soil of his native 
State ; to rest, while time shall endure, in the goodly 
company of heroes and statesmen who had there 
preceded him. Standing among the tombs of the 
many who had tro"d the paths of glory that lead but 
to the grave, were the eminent men of the State ; 
notably, among others, the masters of philosophy 
and poetry, who express its highest thought, and 
give intellectual beauty and glory to the Athens 
of America. Only for such a man could such an 
assembly have been gathered. Something besides 
station evoked that homage of select souls. Among 
these many men of genius, drawn there not merely 
by respect for the dead statesman, but by the prompt- 
ings of an affection springing from kindred tastes 
and years of intimate friendship, it may not be 
improper to individualize a few of those who wit- 
nessed that closing scene of a. conspicuous career. 
There stood Ralph Waldo Emerson, the genial phi- 
losopher, who, in writing of such friends as the one 
then mourned, had expressed, in one of his essays, 
his appreciation of friendship : — 

"I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for my 
friends, the old and new. Shall I not call God the Beautiful, 
who daily showeth himself so to me in his gifts? I chide 
society, I embrace solitude ; and yet I am not so ungrateful as 
not to see the wise, the lovely, and the noble-minded, as, from 
time to time, they pass my gate. Who hears me, who under- 
stands me, becomes mine, a possession for all time. . . . 
High thanks I owe you, excellent lovers, who carry out the 



264 EULOGIES IN U. S. CONGRESS. 

world for me to new and noble depths, and enlarge the mean- 
ing of all my thoughts." 

In that silent and sorrowful company, also stood 
Henry W. Longfellow, witli silver locks, and noble 
brow ; the poet of tenderness, whose words had fitly 
imaged the aspirations of human souls to penetrate 
the veil of death, — words never more fitting than 
when some strong spirit has left " the warm precincts 
of the cheerful day," and passed beyond the dark 
curtain hiding from mortal gaze the realm of mystery 
and night. 

" As the moon from some dark gate of cloud 

Throws o'er the sea a floating bridge of light, 
Across whose trembling planks our fancies crowd 

Into the realm of mystery and night, 
So, from the world of spirits, there descends 

A bridge of light, connecting it with this ; 
O'er whose misteady floor, that sways and bends, 

Wander our thoughts above the dark abyss." 

And there stood Oliver Wendell Holmes, the rich 
and clear in thought, whose Muse to-day celebrates 
his dead friend in other memorial services. Will he 
find more apt thought or expression than those with 
which, years ago, he testified his homage to the mem- 
ory of a brother poet ? — 

"Behold — not him we knew: 
This was the prison which his soul looked through, 
Tender and brave and true. 



B'Mj MhM 




THE GRAVE OF CHARLES SUMNER, MT. AUBURN. 



EULOGIES IN U. S. CONGRESS. 265 

His voice no more is heard ; 
And his dead name — that dear, familiar word — 
Lies on om- lij^s unstirred. 

Here let the body rest, 
Where the calm shadows that his soul lov-ed best 
ISIay slide above his breast. 

Smooth his uncurtained bed ; 
And, if some natural tears are softly shed, 
It is not for the dead. 

Here let him sleeping lie, 
Till heaven's bright vratchers slumber in the sky. 
And Death himself shall die." 

There stood Joliii G. Whittier, the poet of free- 
dom, clarum et venerabile nomen, sad witness of the 
interment of the " man " for whom his exigent Muse 
had called five years before the first election of 
Charles Sumner to the Senate. 



"Where's the man for Massachusetts? 

Where's the voice to speak her free ? 
Where's the hand to light up bonfires, 

From the mountains to the sea? 
Beats her pilgrim pulse no longer ? 

Sits she dumb in her despair ? 
Has she none to break the silence ? 

Has she none to do or dare ? 
O my God ! for one right worthy. 

To lift up her rusted shield, 
And to plant again the pine-tree 

In her banner's tattei-ed field ! " 

23 



266 . EULOGIES IN U. S. CONGRESS. 

I could not doubt that- the grand old poet had 
seen the realization of his ideal in the unflinching- 
champion, now low in death, who had borne a part 
so generous and courageous in the strife for freedom. 
It has been assumed that Charles Sumner was an 
austere man, absorbed in his self-consciousness, and, 
in his daily labors, indifferent to ordinary emotions. 
I refer to the lifelong friendship that knit him to 
men like these, to show the real warmth of his na- 
ture, — his attractive and receptive inner life. I 
recur again to that scene, impressive as it was, as the 
uncovered multitudes silently looked upon the casket 
that enshrined the dead senator, and fitting as it was 
that the State and nation should pause, while these 
sad rites consigned to earth that noble form which 
so long moved, with high power and influence, in 
human affairs, to note the lesson there deeply felt, — 
that Time is the universal conqueror, and the lives 
of the greatest are but a point on the dial of time. 
To very few of the restless, ambitious, striving sons 
of humanity, is immortality of fame attainable. The 
advancing shadows of the past leave imconcealed 
few forms of the men who have occupied the world's 
arena. The cloud approaches, and swallows up suc- 
cessive generations ; obscures, into common blank- 
ness, names and histories that were fondly thought 
imperishable. Only when great opportunities are 
furnished to great talents, can exception be hoped, 
or is it ever realized. The efforts of men to accom- 
plish the birth of some great State, filling broad 
pages in the world's annals ; an empue over the 



ETTLOGIES IN TJ. S. CONGRESS. 267 

intellect or imagmation of mankind, attained by 
the rare genius that dates its infrequent efforts 
with intervals of a score of generations ; the dis- 
covery or application of grand truths for the ame- 
horation of human conditions, — these may give 
immortality to the memory of man, and leave his 
name a household word, even with the indifferent 
future. 

Charles Sumner's fortune did not cast him into an 
era when a great State struggled into being. He 
had not that impulsive, consuming genius that casts 
a glare over the ages. But he lived in an age when 
evils that were scarcely noticed, from their apparent 
insignificance, at the origin of the Republic, had 
grown to vast proportions, had become incompatible 
either with national safety or human rights, and 
gave him a field for labor in which he became illus- 
trious. Earnestly sympathizing with him in that 
work, concurring with him, yearl)y year, in the blows 
that he struck at slavery, I speak with full heart in 
tribute to his courage, his manliness, his singleness 
of purpose, his high achievements. He boldly an- 
nounced, and persistently applied, eternal truths that 
brought to the test the growing wrongs which were 
destroying the meaning of our institutions, and 
giving point to the assertion that the declaration of 
the fathers was a display of glittering generalities. 
The name he earned by these labors of Hercules, 
Massachusetts cannot afford to let die. The enfran- 
chised race must hallow it forever. But it belongs 
to the world, and to all mankind. 



208 



EULOGIES IN U. S. CONGEESS. 



I ppeak of his courage and manliness. Picture 
that almost solitary man as he stood here, twenty 
years ago, uttering what his associates deemed no 
merely hresies, hut blasphemies; the suggestion 
not merely of eccentricity, but of stark madness or 
fatal msiiief. Tire ark he shook with nnsparurg 
™d w s to them most consecrate. Here there were 
; tieal and social ostracism, the f countenance of 
his fellows, so hard to bear in such a bo<ly - « - ■ 
in the country, execration and contempt at home 
even, doubtful and hesitatmg support. Ma.tm 
Luther would go to Worms if there were as many 
de.n altiles on the roots. Charles Sumner would 
go where his convictions led, through obloquy, ha c 
unpopularity, and deadly assault. Let no one who 
Senses the wisdom or iustice of his course deny 
his tortUude and courage. For the work Mi. Sum 
':: performed, there was necessary not ouly feari-^ 
ness and fortitude, but a cool, clear judgment, 
untrin. industry, and perfect integrity. Suspicion 
"sordid motives would have destroyed his influ- 
ence. These necessary ciualities Mr. Sumner pos- 
es"d in the highest degree His devotion t^ the 
one great idea of his life -the abobtion of slavery 
""d the entire pohtical equaUty of all men-wa, 
absorbing and unremitted. If, in the eariier y^ar 
of is senatorial life, to most of his associates here 
Ms utterances against slavery seemed sacnlegiou o 
h sane, long before his death advocacy of slaver, in 
tM lamber would have seemed, to all his associates, 
a n anity or as pleasantry. Less than twenty years 



EULOGIES IN U. S. CONGRESS. 269 

worked this great revolution ; and in this hall he 
was unquestionably the chief inspiring cause and 
guiding spirit. The careful orations which he elabo- 
rated, and here pronounced, exhibiting in remorse- 
less nakedness the repulsive body of slavery, aroused 
the attention of the North, introduced into political 
discussion a moral element almost as potent as reli- 
gious enthusiasm, and changed the issues widely 
from the commercial controversies, that, before that 
time, had divided parties. It would be assuming too 
much, to say that Mr. Sumner was the sole cause of 
the revolution that was wrought, mighty as was his 
influence. There were other able laborers in the 
Senate, and in the country, increasing in numbers as 
events progressed. Slavery gave food for excite- 
ment by its measures of resistance, which were often 
carried to aggression, and by new demands ; and it 
took the final stand in opposition to the government, 
without which all the eloquence of Charles Sumner 
and his associates, and all the aroused spirit of the 
North, would have left it intact in its strongholds. 

The lurid flames of civil war let in a more intense 
light upon this great stage, and fi.xed the attention 
of mankind upon the actors who played a part un- 
equalled in the world's drama. Among these, Mr. 
Sumner was not excelled for sagacity or patriotism. 
I am disposed now to concede that the war was a 
logical result of the teachings of Mr. Sumner and 
Iiij compeers ; though only peaceful revolution, the 
force of persuasion only, was intended by them. 
They combated a power of unknown force and pro- 

23* 



270 EULOGIES IN U. S. CONGRESS. 

portions, of unascertained sensitiveness and vigor. 
They boldly thrust their torches into a magazine. 
They zealously promoted ends where the reisistance 
arose from both passion and interest ; and the col- 
lision was unexpectedly a convulsion where the 
frame-work of the government trembled on its 
foundations. They believed that to circumscribe 
slavery within its existing boundaries was to put it 
in a course of ultimate extinction. But its extinc- 
tion, peaceful or otherwise, was not desired, would 
not be tolerated, by its ultra friends; and hence, 
when a party triumphed with Charles Sumner's 
dominant idea, the friends of the twin relic took the 
fatal step of secession contemplated as their dernier 
ressort. 

Mr. Sumner met this crisis with statesmanlike de- 
cision. In those days, as a member of the other 
House, I had often opportunity to listen to his utter- 
ances on the floor of the Senate. No man ever, 
heard, from his lips, counsels for submission or un- 
Avorthy compliance. Rather was he stern and 
aggressive, as befitted the times. He was among 
the first to proclaim that the war for slavery could 
onl}' be put down by the annihihition of slavery. 
Where others of his party timidly followed or re- 
sisted, he boldly led. He was the embodiment at 
once of the convictions and courag6 of his noble 
State. In the prime of manhood and of his intellec- 
tual powers, hardened in grain and nerve by the 
long exercise of his strength in senatorial conflicts, 
his decisive voice gave boldness and energy to the 



EULOGIES IN U. S. CONGRESS. 271 

counsels of the American Senate, where only bokl- 
nes^s and energy could cope with the appalling diffi- 
culdes that assailed the country. To Mr. Sumner 
largely, to men of his bold and sagacious spirit 
wholly, the nation owes it that it is now not only 
united, but free, from the Canadas to the Gulf. 

Fn.ncis Lieber, in his "Political Ethics," says, 
" The dread of unpopularity has ruined many states- 
men, ed authors to abjure the truth, and seduced 
citizens to crooked paths." With Charles Sumner, 
no drtad of unpopularity ever ope<rated to deflect 
him from his chosen path of duty. He might err, 
he did sometimes err, in choosing that path ; but he 
pursu3d it sturdily, without selfish fear of con- 
sequences. He was sometimes harsh in his judg- 
ment of the motives of others ; but his own were 
transparent, and frankly avowed. He was tenacious 
of his opinions in good or evil report. His reliance 
upon his own resources was unwavering ; his confi- 
dence in his own convictions was supreme. He ex- 
pected, rather than courted, the concurrence of the 
people. In a remarkable passage in the " Memorial 
de Sainte Helene," Napoleon declared, " Thus we 
ought to serve the people worthily, and not occupy 
ourselves with pleasing them. The best way of 
gaining them is by doing them good." This teach- 
ing, however strange in the mouth of the august 
author, seems to embody the philosophy of Mr. 
Sumner's political life. Yet he was gratified l)y the 
love of tlie people of Massachusetts, and proud of 
their confidence. On the last day that he ever 



272 EULOGIES IN U. S. CONGEERS. 

visited this Senate, when the resolution had be^n 
read that testified that the people of his State, hy 
their representatives, had rescinded the only cenRire 
of him that they had ever uttered during his long 
career of service, he feelingly expressed to mS his 
appreciation of that great act of justice, and spoke 
warmly of the kindness that had cheered him during 
liis last visit to his State. Yet it is said that to no 
man did he complain of that censure, and by ao act 
or word ever sought its reversal. So he had none 
of the arts of the politician ; had no party within 
his party, no leaders of cliques or factions at his 
back ; and left wholly to the people the care of his 
political fortune. 

It is meet that to the memory of such a man, — 
scholar, statesman, and patriot, — high honors be paid. 
He was himself generous of eulogy to departed 
worth. I have sought to add but a leaf to the gar- 
land that decorates his tomb. 



BY HON. H. B. A:N'TH0NY OF RHODE ISLAND. 

Mr. President, — I can add nothing of narration 
or of eulogy to what has been said, and so well said. 
Mr. Sumner's life, his character, and his services, 
have been fittingly presented, and on both sides of 
the chamber. The generous voices of political op- 
ponents have followed the affectionate praises of 
devoted friends ; and nothing remains but to close 



EULOGIES IN U. S. CONGRESS. 273 

tl'iis sad and august observance. Yet something for- 
bids my entire silence, and impels me to interpose a 
few sentences before the subject passes from the con- 
sideration of the Senate. My acquaintance with 
INIr. Sumner commenced previous to my entrance 
into this body, where it ripened into a friendship 
which will always remain among the most agreeable 
recollections of my public life. I remained asso- 
ciated with him until every other seat in the cham- 
ber, except one, had changed its occupant, and eight 
new ones had been added. Some left us in the 
ordinary chances and changes of political fortunes ; 
some were transferred to other departments of the 
public service ; and of these, some have returned 
again to the Senate ; some, as Douglas and Baker 
and Collamer and Foot and Fessenden, fell, like Sum- 
ner, at their posts, and, hke him, were borne to their 
final repose with all the demonstrations of public 
gratitude, of official respect, and of popular affection, 
with which a generous constituency decorates the 
memory of those whose lives have been spent in its 
service, and who have worthily Avorn its honors. But 
Mr. Sumner's constituency was the Republic, wide 
as its farthest boundary, and permeating its utmost 
limits ; for he was conspicuously the representative 
of a principle which, although seminal in the organ- 
ization of the government, was slow of growth, and 
fructified largely under his care. When the intel- 
ligence of his death followed so close upon the first 
intimation of his danger, it fell' with an equal shock 
upon all classes of society, upon " all sorts and con- 



274 EULOGIES IN U. S. CONGRESS. 

ditions of men ; " it invaded with equal sorrow the 
abodes of luxury, and the cottages of the poor, — 

pauperum tdbernas, 
Regumque turres. 

The scholar closed his book, and the laborer leaned 
upon his spade. The highest in the land mourned 
their peer, the lowliest lamented their friend. How 
well his life had earned this universal testimony of 
respect ; how naturally the broad sympathy which he 
had manifested for the wronged and the injured of 
every condition came back to honor his memory, — 
it is not my purpose to enlarge upon. His eulogy is 
his life ; his epitaph is the general grief ; his monu- 
ment, builded by his own hands, is the eternal stat- 
ute of freedom. 

Mr. President, when I look back over this long 
period, crowded with great events, and which has 
witnessed the convulsion of the nation, the re- 
organization and reconstruction of our political sys- 
tem ; when, in my mind's eye, I people this chamber 
with those whose forms have been familiar to me, 
whose names, many of them historical names, have 
been labelled on these desks, and are now carved on 
the marble that covers their dust, — I am filled with a 
sadness inexpressible, yet full of consolation. For, 
musing on the transitory nature of all sublunary 
things, I come to perceive that their mstability is not 
in their essence, but in the. forms which they assume, 
and in the agencies that operate upon them; and 
when I recall those whom I have seen fall around 



EULOGIES IN U. S. CONGRESS. 275 

me, and whom I thought necessary to the success, 
almost to the preservation, of great principles, I re- 
call also those whom I have seen stej) into the vacant 
places, put on the armor which they wore, lift the 
weapons which they wielded, and march on to the 
consummation of the work which they inaugurated. 
And thus I am filled with reverent wonder at the 
beneficent ordering of Nature, and inspired with a 
loftier faith in that almighty Power, without whose 
guidance and direction all human effort is vain, and 
with whose blessing the humblest instruments that 
he selects are equal to the mightiest work that he 
designs. 



276 EULOGIES DT U. S. CONGRESS. 



IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES. 



BY HON. E. R. HOAR. 

Me. Speaker, — Wlien, more than six weeks 
ago, the announcement of the death of the senator 
from Massachusetts was made in this hall, the 
shock was so sudden, the sense of loss and bereave- 
ment so great, that we all felt the most fitting em^ 
ployment of the time to be to " commune with 
our own hearts, and be still." Public business was 
suspended until that, lifeless form could be brought 
to rest, for a few hours, under the great dome of the 
Capitol, crowned by the emblem of that liberty at 
whose altar the homage of his life had been offered ; 
and then in the Senate-chamber, by senators and 
representatives, president and cabinet, judges and 
warriors, the ministers of foreign powers, clergy, 
and people, in the presence of the great reconciler 
Death, were performed those funeral rites with which 
the nation honors those of her sons who have " fallen 
in high places." We bore him from these scenes of 
his public labors to the old Commonwealth which 
gave him birth ; and there, in the home of his child- 
hood and manhood, in the presence of countless thou- 
sands who thronged to unite in that last tribute of 



EULOGIES IK IT. S. CONGRESS. 277 

respect and affection, the State reverently and ten- 
derly committed to the earth, to mingle with kindred 
dust, the earthly remains of her foremost public man, 
and best-beloved citizen. And, now that his char- 
acter and fame are passing into memory and history, 
it is fitting that we, his contemporaries and associates 
in the public service, should be allowed a brief 
opportunity to express our estimate of the man, and 
of his relation to his country and manldnd. 

Charles Sumner was born in Boston, on the 6th of 
Januarj^ 1811 ; the son of Charles Pinckney Sumner, 
who was for a long time the sheriff of Suffolk 
County. His early education was at the Boston 
Latin School, from which he entered Harvard Col- 
lege, and graduated with distinction in 1830. He 
studied law, under Story and Greenleaf, in the Law 
School of that institution ; and for three years was 
employed to take the place of Judge Story as a lec- 
turer and instructor in law during the sessions of 
the Supreme Court at Washington. He spent the 
next three years in Europe, where, both in England 
and on the Continent, he formed the acquaintance, 
and gained the friendship, of many distinguished men ; 
acquired a familiarity with some European languages ; 
diligently pursued liis studies in literature, history, 
and jurisprudence ; and gratified as well as cultivated 
his taste for art. He returned to the practice and 
study of his profession, in which he gained an hon- 
orable and distinguished position, chiefly due to his 
profound and extensive learning. He never argued 
many causes, but conducted such as he had with 

24 



278 EULOGIES IN U. S. CONGRESS. 

marked ability and success. He edited " The Amer- 
ican Jurist," the twenty volumes of Vesey's Reports, 
and was the reporter of three volumes of the decis- 
ions of Judge Story in the first circuit. His first 
public performance which attracted general atten- 
tion was liis oration on " The True Grandeur of Na- 
tions," before the municipal authorities of Boston, on 
the 4th of July, 1845 ; Avhich Richard Cobden pro- 
nounced " the most noble contribution made by any 
modern writer to the cause of peace." He had voted 
with the Whig party, but took no active part in 
political affairs, until the great controversy upon the 
question of slavery, especially as affected by the war 
with Mexico, and the proposed annexation of Texas, 
brought him into the front rank of the advocates of 
universal liberty. He dechned a nomination as rep- 
resentative in Congress. In April, 1851, he was 
elected to the Senate of the United States, for the 
full term succeeding that which had been held by 
Mr. Webster, and, in its last few months, by ]Mr. 
Winthrop and Mr. Rantoul. His election was made by 
a coalition of the Free-soil party and the Democrats ; 
Mr. Boutwell, who was the Democratic candidate 
for governor of Massachusetts, being elected by the 
same combination of parties. He took his seat in 
the Senate on the 1st of December, 1851. His first 
great speech in the Senate was in support of a mo- 
tion to repeal the Fugitive-Slave Law, and was deliv- 
ered on the 25th of August, 1852. He was struck 
down, at his desk in the Senate-chamber, by blows 
upon the head, inflicted by a representative from 



EULOGIES IN U. S. CONGRESS. 279 

South Carolina, on the 18th of May, 1856, in pro- 
fessed revenge for words spoken in debate two days 
•before. The terrible injury to the spinal column, 
which was nearly fatal at the time, resulted in the 
malady, angina pectoris^ which at last terminated his 
hfe. In consequence of the suffering and illness 
caused by this assault, he was absent from his place 
in the Senate, during most of the time, for four years. 
He was re-elected to the Senate in 1857, in 1863, and 
in 1869, and died on the 11th of March, 1874 ; hav- 
ing attended the session of that body on the clay 
before his death. 

Such are the simple outlines of his life. Yet how 
affluent a culture, how wide an influence, and how 
absolute a conscience, how perfect an integrity, 
how enduring a fame, how tender and affectionate a 
heart, belonged to the man who filled out those out- 
lines to the full measure of a noble and heroic char- 
acter ! The only office he ever held was that of 
senator from Massachusetts ; and, when he died, he 
was the senior senator in length of continuous ser- 
vice. His successive re-elections were carried by 
great waves of public sentiment, without bargains, 
without concealments, without pledges (except those 
of his life and known opinions), and without competi- 
tors : for twenty-three years the record of his public 
life is the history of the country. He took part in 
all the great debates ; and his name is indelibly asso- 
ciated with all the great results which that period 
has produced. And what accomplished results it 



280 EULOGIES IN U. R. CONGRESS. 

was his privilege to see ! How much of the great 
work and object of his life was obtained before it 
closed! When he entered the Senate, thqre were 
but two others there of his political opinions. Before 
he died, he was the leader of a majority of more than 
two-thirds of the body. He came there an advocate 
of impartial liberty throughout the land, the antag- 
onist of slavery wherever it could be reached under 
the Constitution. He was treated as a detested fa- 
natic. He tried for months, in vain, to get a hearing ; 
and was even refused a place on any committee, as 
outside of any healthy political organization. He 
lived to see the adoption of the Thirteenth, Four- 
teenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitu- 
tion ; to be the head of the Committee on Foreign 
Relations ; to see the men of the proscribed color ad- 
mitted to seats in both branches of Congress, and to 
know that he had helped to emancipate them ; with 
the respect and confidence of the nation, before whom 
he had pleaded, that "nothing is safer than justice," 
and to whom he had contended that "nothing is set- 
tled that is not right." His first public utterance was 
in favor of peace, and the amicable settlement of dif- 
ferences among nations ; which was contemptuously 
received as the dream of a visionary enthusiast. He 
lived to see the negotiation of the treaty of Wash- 
ington, and its consummation in the arbitration at 
Geneva. 

Mr. Sumner was thoroughly and truly an Ameri- 
can. He believed in his countr}^ in her unity, her 
grandeur, her ideas, and her destiny. He had drunk 



EULOGIES IN U. S. CONGRESS. 281 

deep from the sources of American institutious, in 
the writings and lives of our Eevolutlonary fathers. 
He was an idealist, and trusted the future. To his 
far-reaching vision, it was always true that 

' ' Every gift of noblest origiu 
Is breathed upon by Hope's perpeiual breath." 

His spirit was of the morning ; and his face was 
radiant with the sunrise he intently watched. He 
saw in the future of America a noble and j)ursuant 
nation, its grand Constitution conformed to and con- 
strued by the grander Declaration of 1776, purged of 
every stain and inconsistency, the home of the home- 
less, the refuge of the oppressed, the paradise of the 
poor, the example of honor, justice, peace, and free- 
dom to the nations of the earth. His personal in- 
tegrity was so absolute, that no breath of suspicion 
even ever sullied it. He said to a friend, " People 
talk about the corruption of Washington : I have 
lived here all these years, and have seen nothing of 
it." He never had au}^ tracks to cover up, or opin- 
ions or motives to conceal. You remember well his 
commanding presence, his stalwart frame, the vigor 
and gi'acc of his motions, the charm of his manners, 
11ic polish of his rhetoric, the abuncfence of his learn- 
ing, the fervor and impressivcness of his oratory. 
He was every inch a senator, and upheld, with zeal 
and fidelity, tha dignity, privileges, and authority of 
the Senate. 

He never seems to have known fear. His courage, 
and power of resolute endurance, were conspicuously 

24* 



282 EULOGIES IN U. S. CONGRESS. 

shown in his undergoing the moxa, — the application 
of hot irons the whole length of the spine, — which his 
I^hysician said was the most terrible torture he ever 
knew inflicted on man or animal ; and which he bore 
without taking ether, because he was told, that, by 
so doing, there was a little better prospect that the 
treatment would be efficacious. There is no doubt 
that he died a martyr to the cause of libert}^, and to 
the efforts which he would not relax in its behalf, as 
truly as they who fell on the field of battle. The 
bludgeon preceded the bayonet and the bullet in that 
civil war which began long before 1861, and did its 
work of death as surely, if more slowly. Of his 
private life, of his genial and liberal hospitality, of 
the strength and warmth of his friendships, of his 
curious stores of ■ information, of his treasures of 
literature and art, of his tenderness and sweetness 
towards those who loved and trusted him, there is 
no time or need, speaking in this place, and on this 
occasion. But there are many of the pure and gen- 
tle, of the thoughtful and richly-cultured, to whom 
the tidings of his death brought tender and precious 
memories of these things. No doubt Mr. Sumner 
had defects of character. I think he had little sense 
of humor ; and some more of it might have been of 
service to him. He was an orator, and not a debater ; 
and, if he had had more of the training of the bar and 
the popular assembly, might perhaps -sometimes have 
made a more direct and forcible impression upon 
those whom he sought to convince, and who were 
wearied with his stately periods, and inexhaustible 



EULOGIES IN U. S. CONGRESS. 283 

learning. But some of his faults were closely allied 
to Ills virtues, and to the sources of his power. He 
was of an imperious nature, and intolerant of differ- 
ence in opinion by his associates, and has been called 
an egotist. But all this came largely from the 
strength of his convictions, from his own behef in 
his own thoroughness of study and purity of purpose, 
and from what has been happily described as his sub- 
lime confidence in his own moral sagacity. He was 
terribly in earnest, and could not understand how 
others would fail to see what he saw so clearly. It 
may, indeed, be true that in advancing age, and still 
striving to bear up and do his work, under a terrible 
burden of shattered health and worn nerves, he made 
judgments which some of us have thought unjust, 
and severed associations which some of us would 
gladly have seen preserved. But let me say for 
him, that I believe he carried to the grave as few 
resentments, as little animosity, as rarely is found in 
the hearts of men whose lives have been passed in 
scenes of public conflict. 

I saw him frequently and familiarly during the last 
four months of his life, and wish to give my testi- 
mony to the gentleness and kindness of his temper 
during all that time, and to the fact that he uttered 
no word of harshness or censure, in my hearing, con- 
cerning any human being. It was noticeable and 
touching to observe, it is gratifying to remember, 
and I think it would have been pleasant to him to 
know that it would l)e here remembered of him. 
But the time allowed me is short, and I must not 



284 EULOGIES IN TJ. S. CONGRESS. 

withhold your attention from those who are to 
follow. I cannot better sum up the character I have 
described than by adopting language which has been 
applied to the character of Milton : " A high ideal 
purpose maintained ; a function discharged through 
life with unwavering consistency ; austerity, but the 
austerity not of monks, but of heroes ; incapable of 
depression, but also, as far as appears, incapable of 
mirth." As I stood by the dying-bed of him who 
was my friend for thirty years, and heard the re- 
peated exclamation, " Oh, so tired! Oh, so weary!" 
the old hymn of the Church seemed to be sounding 
in my ears, — 

" Yes, peace, for war is needless; 
Yes, calm, for storm is past; 
And rest from finished labor, 
An anchorage at last." 

The weary are at rest. The good and faithful 
servant has entered into the joy of his Lord. 



BY HON. HENRY L. DAWES. 

Mr. Speaker, — It is from no lack of eulogy or 
tribute already fitly spoken by stricken Massachusetts, 
that I seek to be heard on this occasion. But, longer 
than any other of her representatives here at the 
Capitol, it has been my good fortune to have been 
associated with INIr. Sumner in the public service, 
and to stand by him as a colleague in the representa- 



I 



EULOGIES IN U. S. CONGRESS. 285 

tion of tliat State. He had served a full term in the 
Senate when I entered this House, more than seven- 
teen years ago. I had met him here in his very first 
session, which was, in fact, the commencement of 
his public hfe ; for that public life, when measured 
by the limitation of years, began and ended with his 
service as a senator of the United States from Massa- 
chusetts. No man can justly estimate that great 
public career, which has so suddenly and sadly closed, 
who fails to comprehend the times which gave it 
birth, and the events out of which its grand propor- 
tions have been rounded into matchless perfection 
and power. How much they developed him, and he 
them, belongs to the historian and biographer, and 
not to the eulogist. The life and times of Charles 
Sumner will be a chapter in the world's history, 
standing out all alone, and by itself. To the latest 
day that it will be read of men, there will be found 
in it nothing ordinary ; but, from its inception to its 
close, every thing was cast in a mould which had no 
prototype, and on a scale by which nothing else has 
been measured. If we go back from the grand con- 
summation to the beginning, there will be found the 
same extraordinary conditions which have attended 
every step of his great career, upward and onward to 
its end. He had never held public office till he entered 
the Senate-chamber in December, 1851. Calhoun 
had died in the previous year, and both Clay and 
Webster in the year which followed. As Mr. Sum- 
ner entered the arena made illustrious by the groat 
struggles of the giants of that day, and sought his 



286 EULOGIES IN U. S. CONGRESS. 

own position in coming conflicts, Mr. Benton said to 
him, — 

" You have come upon the stage too late, sir : all 
our great men have passed away. Mr. Calhoun and 
Mr. Clay and Mr. Webster are gone. Not only have 
the great men passed away ; but the great issues too, 
raised from our form of government, and of deepest 
interest to its founders and their immediate descend- 
ants, have been settled also. The last of these was 
the national bank; and that has been overthrown 
forever. Nothing is left you, sir, but puny sectional 
questions, and petty strifes about slavery and fugitive- 
slave laws, involving no national interests." 

How limited is human vision ! The great men, and 
the then great issues with which they wrestled, filled, 
as they were receding from his view, the whole 
horizon of a statesman whose own participation in 
public affairs covered, in that very forum, the unpar- 
alleled period of thirty years. But as men some- 
times build better than they know, so more often do 
they build in a way, and tread a path, they know not 
of. Calhoun and Clay and AVebster did, indeed, 
pass away. But the sun which seemed to set with 
them rose again, almost simultaneously, with a new 
and a grander glory ; and there was no night. Sew- 
ard and Chase and Sumner stood up in the places 
made vacant by those mighty intellects ; and issues 
more momentous and far-reaching than ever before 
confronted statesmanship sprung up under their very 
feet, and out of the ashes of struggles vainly sup- 
posed to have become extinct. The world's history 



EULOGIES IN U. S. CONGRESS. 287 

« 

furnishes no parallel to the pages which shall trnlh- 
fully chronicle the character and consequences of the 
conflicts into which slavery and fugitive-slave laws 
hurled the nation almost from the hour of this lam- 
entation over repose. And the young senator from 
Massachusetts had no occasion to wait for opportu- 
nity. • He was summoned to the very front of the 
conflict, and, without hesitation or delay, took the 
position wliich conviction of duty, as well as public 
exigency, assigned him. If, therefore, it had been 
permitted to Mr. Sumner, standing at the goal, and 
looking back along the years of his labor, with all 
that increased knowledge and wider experience, that 
wealth of philanthropy, and expansion of heart, which 
crowned his last days, — had it then been permitted 
him to choose, could he have selected a moment more 
fit, or crowned with grander opportunities, for the en- 
listment of his vast and varied powers, than the one 
which called him to his work ? Hardly had he en- 
tered upon it before he received, upon his own person, 
the concentrated malignity of that barbarous system 
of society with which he grappled, in blows the effects 
of which never left him, but which, failing to silence, 
consecrated him to the sublime mission he so grandly 
filled. 

That work, thus begun, had many phases, and led 
him along many ways which sometimes, for the mo- 
ment, seemed devious, and which ofttimes compelled 
him to invoke instrumentalities pronounced doubtful 
by the bystander. But all the while it grew upon 
his hands : it broadened, and it deepened, towering 



288 EULOGIES IN U. S. CONGRESS. 

above and dwarfing all other work which fell to the 
lot of other statesmen. Grand in its very. simplicity, 
sublime in its very comprehensiveness, it enlisted the 
noblest aspirations of the statesman, and lifted his 
whole being into an atmosphere and life and vigor 
all its own. Absolute human equality secured, as- 
sured, and invulnerable, was the work to which,' with 
a baptism of blood and suffering, he consecrated all 
his powers, all his life, and all his hopes. In that 
work he himself grew great. Around about it, as a 
centre, all the attributes of his mind, and elements of 
his character, called into active service, and put to 
constant task, were developed, till, like the one mus- 
cle of the blacksmith's right arm, they attained a 
growth and strength unlike all others. He was an 
eloquent man ; but through all his rhetoric gleamed 
the battle-axe, cleaving the chains of the slave, and 
beating down the hoary head of caste. His ora- 
tions were not set with diamonds, nor decked with 
flowers; but they thundered along the unbending 
track of logic, irresistible and crushing. They had 
one purpose, the consummation of his hfe-work ; and 
he in them marshalled the whole artillery of rhetoric 
and of speech for the assault. Learning he acquired 
as no other man in public life ; but he devoted it all 
to this his one great struggle ; and while he levied 
upon ancient lore and modern research alike for 
illustration, for argument, for admonition, and for en- 
couragement, it was only as for so many recruits to 
the forces he commanded in a life-campaign against 
himian bondage. Thus it is that his public addresses, 



EULOGIES IN U. S. CONGRESS. 289 

with few exceptions, stand as monuments both of 
his own power as an orator, and of the transcendent 
work .to which his whole life had been set apart. 
Yet on those rare occasions when he permitted him- 
self, as if in relaxation, to indulge in current debate 
or in popular address, he has left ample evidence 
that hivS mind was richly endowed with all those rare 
gifts of oratory which have in all times charmed, 
instructed, and swayed the popular mind. Some of 
these orations are masterly productions, of wide- 
spread fame. 

To speak of the work itself to which Mr. Sumner 
set apart his life, and for which he laid it down, 
would be to attempt not only the history of his 
country, from his entrance into public life to the 
hour when his labors ceased, but also that of human 
rights and human equality the world over. This 
cannot be attempted here. Happily it is not needed 
to complete the duty of the hour. That work, once 
derided, denounced, scoffed at, and spit upon, has now 
conquered all opposition, and to-day commands a 
support well-nigh universal. There remains no 
forum in which its justice is debated, and no home 
or heart so lowly that its efi&cacy does not reach it. 
It was not j)ermitted him to see the formal enactment 
of a civil-rights bill he had so long labored and 
waited for. But he knew that this keystone of the 
grand arch was already fitted to its place. What he 
suffered, what he sacrificed, what he lifted, and 
carried to the end of all things on earth to him, in 
the hope that his own work might be completed by 

23 



290 EULOGIES IN U. S. CONGEESS. 

his own hands, cannot now be put in words. I have 
said that Mr. Sumner was sometimes misunderstood. 
I spealv not now of that common lot of public men 
which subjects them to the misrepresentations and 
denunciations of opponents, often as indiscriminate 
as unjust. There is a more trying ordeal, Avhen the 
vision oi friends becomes dim, and familiar faces 
turn away, for a time, in doubt and distrust. Then 
the statesman Avho is faithful to his convictions will 
wait patiently and silently in the path of duty, till 
the mist lifting-, and the light breal^ing in, the blinded 
see again the outline of that pathway, and hail anew 
his advancing footsteps. Thus recently his own be- 
loved Commonwealth, proud and long-trusting as she 
is, yet, for a moment, losing her vision in a bewilder- 
ing twilight, turned her face away from Mr. Sumner 
and his work. Not a word of complaint fell from 
his lips. Conscious of a lofty and noble aspiration, 
and with an unfaltering faith that time would bring 
him vindication, he waited patiently for the dawn of 
a brighter day, and the opening of a clearer vision. 
They came at last, Ivat only just in time to save her, 
in tliis her day of mourning, the added pang of un- 
atoned injustice. I have no space to speak of those 
varied accomplishments, that wealth of knowledge, 
and that kindliness of heart, which were the charm 
of his social life. But I desire to put on record my 
deep obligations for an unbroken friendship of seven- 
teen years, begun in a common public service, and 
interrupted by that great event which has alike 
crushed private friendships and social ties, and 



EULOGIES IN U. S. CONGRESS. 291 

brought irreparable loss upon the public service, the 
country, and mankind. Mr. Sumner reared his own 
monument, and has left it complete. It will stand 
peerless through all the ages that free government 
and human equality shall exist on the earth. An 
enslaved race, lifted to freedom, to citizenship, and 
to equal rights, will crown it with the garlands of 
fresh effort and victorious struggle toward a com- 
pleted manhood. The Commonwealth whose son 
he was, and whose commission he bore, will cherish 
tenderly his memory, and point proudly to the name 
which is at once history and inspiration. 



BY HON. J. H. RAINEY. 

Mr. Speaker, — Not long since, we were called 
upon to lay aside our accustomed duties of legisla- 
tion, to participate in the mournful procession that 
signalized the departure, of the distinguished states- 
man and philanthropist who has been summoned 
before the bar of our final Judge. We have again 
halted to pay further tribute to his memory and 
intrinsic worth. The announcement of the death 
of Charles Sumner, late senator from the State of 
?ilassachusetts, sent a thrill of sorrow, and cast a 
;hade of melancholy gloom, over this country, more 
pervading in its general effects than any similar 
event since the assassination of the lamented Lin- 
coln. Language such as I have at my command is 



292 EULOGIES IN U. S. CONGRESS. 

too imperfect and feeble to convey in adequate terras 
the high estimation in wliich he was hehl, or to 
express fully and feelingly the depth of grief his 
demise has occasioned. Men and women mourn his 
loss, and shed the tear of regretful sadness, not only 
in large cities, and the x)alatial dwellings occupied by 
the learned and wealthy, but in villages and ham- 
lets, upon farms and distant plantations of the South ; 
into the cabins of the unlettered and the lowly, be- 
reavement found its way, bowing the liearts of all in 
mournful lamentation for this irreparaljle loss. Mr. 
Sumner, in name and deeds, is known, revered, and 
esteemed by all classes of our people. The remark- 
able and noble battles of argument and eloquence 
which he has fought in the Senate, in behalf of the 
oppressed, have enshrined him in the hearts of his 
countrymen, milHons of whom never beheld his 
majestic form, nor heard his deep and impressive 
voice, — that voice which at no time indulged silence 
when the cause of the down-trodden and the enslaved 
was the issue. 

Early in life Mr. Sumner espoused the cause of 
those who were not al)le to speak for themselves, 
and whose bondage made it hazardous for any one 
else to venture a word in their behalf. No one knew 
the danger and magnitude of such an undertaking 
better than the deceased. Public sentiment, at that 
time, was opposed to liis course ; ostracism confronted 
him; friends forsook him: but undaunted, and full 
of courage, he pursued the right, sustained his con- 
victions, and lived long enough to see the frui- 



EULOGIES IN U. S. CONGRESS. 293 

tion of his earnest labors. He was among the first 
to arouse the CommonweaUh of his beloved INIassa- 
chusetts to consider the justice and equity of mixed 
schools. The blows he gave were effectual ; the 
separating walls could not withstand them ; they 
consequently tottered and fell. The doors of the 
schoolhouses flew open to all ; prejudice was well- 
nigh consumed by the blaze of his ardent eloquence ; 
and proscription gave way to more hberal views. It 
was upon his motion, that the first colored man was 
admitted to practise before the Supreme Court of 
the United States. These remarks are made to show 
that the cause of my race was always foremost in his 
mind : indeed, he was a fi'iend, who, in many in- 
stances, stuck closer than a brother. He was one 
of those who never slumbered upon his lance, but 
stood ever watcliful for the opportunity to hurl the 
shaft of his forensic powers against the institution 
of slavery. The forum, the platform, and the legis- 
lative hall bear equal testimony to his untiring zeal, 
and determined opposition to it. 

The barbarities and atrocities of slavery, through 
the aid of his giant mind, were brought to the atten- 
tion of the American people and the world in a 
manner and style hitherto unknown. He was God's 
chosen advocate of freedom, and denouncer of the 
crime of the " pecuhar institution " which blurred 
the fair record, and threatened ultimately to destroy 
the growing fame, of his country. So attractive, 
instructive, and inviting was his mode of argument, 
that even those who opposed him most strenuously 

25* 



294 EULOGIES IN U. S. CONGRESS. 

were constrained to " read, mark, learn, and inwardly 
digest" his utterances. This was doubtless owing, 
in a great measure, to his rare talents and acquire- 
ments, and the splendid opportunity he enjoyed uf 
speaking to the country. 

Mr. Sumner was a patriot of no ordinary rank ; he 
was a lover of his country, the whole country, in 
the broadest and the most comprehensive signification 
of the term. Whatever he did to hinder the exten- 
sion of slavery, or to hasten the day of its final 
abolition, was based not upon hatred or antipathy 
to the South, but upon a conviction that it was not 
only wrong to humanity, but an accursed blot upon 
the escutcheon of the Republic. He knew full well 
that it would tarnish the beauty of its history : 
therefore he felt the duty pressing to combat it. In 
a word, he did not hate the South, nor the slave- 
holder ; but he hated and detested slavery. His 
desire was, that the South, as well as the North, 
should share in the real grandeur of this republican 
empire. He was aware that the impartial historian 
could not complete his task so long as slavery ex- 
isted, unless the pen, as it were, was dipped in 
human blood, the thought of which, to him, was 
revolting. Oh that the South liad heeded his admo- 
nition, and let the oppressed go free ! As a states- 
man, Mr. Sumner may have allowed his zeal to 
outrun his discretion, and thus made mistakes. 

" To err is human ; to forgive, divine." 
It was evident, however, that his errors ever leaned 



EULOGIES IN U. S. CONGRESS. 295 

to the side of justice and liumanity. He could not 
comprehend any fundamental law that did not em- 
brace, in its provisions, the cause of the poor and the 
needy : consequently, his construction of the Consti- 
tution differed, in many essential particulars, from 
that put upon it by other statesmen, who were less 
liberal in their opinions, and more partial and biassed 
in their judgment. He was strong to his convic- 
tions, faithful to duty, and true to his country. 
How appropriate are the following lines in tracing 
his active and useful life ! — 

" Stanch at thy post, to meet life's common doom, 

It scarce seems death to die as thou hast died ; 

Thy duty done, thy truth, strength, courage, tried, 

And all things ripe for the fulfilling tomb. 

A crown would mock thy hearse's sable gloom, 

AVhose virtues raised thee higher than a throne. 

Whose faults were erring Nature's, not his own, — 

Such be thy sentence, writ with fame's bright plume, 

Amongst the good and great ; for thou wast great, 

In thought, word, deed, like mightiest ones of old, 

Full of the honest truth which makes men bold, 

Wise, pure, firm, just: the noblest Roman's state 

Became not more a ruler of the free. 

Than thy plain life, high thoughts, and matchless constancy." 

As compared to his admirers, Mr. Sumner's circle 
of intimate friends was not very numerous. Only a 
few genial spirits imparted to him social pleasure and 
mental enjoyment. He found his chief delight in 
the companionship of books, and the study of the fine 
arts. But, with this rare appreciation for the classic 



296 EULOGIES IN IT. S. CONGRESS. 

and the artistic, he possessed, in an astonisliing 
degree, the faculty of adapting himself to social inter- 
course with those whose attainments were not com- 
mensurate with his own. He was ahvays willing to 
receive such as visited him, seeking counsel or advice, 
without regard to present circumstances or former con- 
dition. His friendship, when formed, was sincere 
and advantageous. I did myself the honor to call 
upon him occasionally ; not as often, however, as I 
felt inchned, for I knew that his time was valuable, 
not only to himself, but to his country. Never did 
I call but I found him glad to see me, and ready to 
lay aside constantly exacting duties, and engage in 
such conversation as invariably resulted in ray being 
benefited. It was very perceptible, that the aim and 
bent of his master-mind was to elevate to true man- 
hood the race with which I am particularly identified. 
I can never forget, so long as I have the faculty of 
recollection, the warm and friendly grasp he gave 
this hand of mine soon after I was admitted a mem- 
ber of this House. On my first visit to the Senate, 
he said, " I welcome you to this chamber. Come 
over frequently : you have rights here as well as 
others." 

During his senatorial career, embracing a period 
of twenty-three years, he has contended for a moral 
jirinciple, against enemies more daring and intrepid, 
perhaps, than any other man has encountered in the 
same space of time. This principle was to him more 
dear than life itself. His conscientious convictions, 
that slavery was a national crime and moral sin, 



EULOGIES IN F. S. CONGRESS. 297 

could not endure tamely assertions to the contrary. 
He heeded not the menacing denunciations of those 
"who eat the bread of wickedness, and drink the 
wine of violence." Their execrations could not 
move nor intimidate him. Finding these instru- 
ments of wickedness could not deter him, or turn 
the keen edge of his argument, he was brutally 
and cowardly assaulted in the Senate-chamber, in 
1856, by Preston S. Brooks, a representative from 
South Carolina. This occurred a few days after his 
masterly effort, setting forth the " Crime against 
Kansas." 

Mr. Speaker, that unprovoked assault declared to 
the country the threatening attitude of the two sec- 
tions, one against the other, and awakened a deter- 
mination on the part of the North to resist the en- 
croachments of slaver3^ The unexpressed sympathy 
that was felt for him among the slaves of the South, 
when they heard of this unwarranted attack, was 
only known to those whose situations, at the time, 
made them confidants. Their prayers and secret 
importunities were ever uttered in the interest of 
him who was their constant friend, and untiring 
advocate and defender before the high court of the 
nation. 

Mr. Speaker, it is said that " the blood of the 
mart^-rs is the seed of the Church." With equal 
truthfulness and force, I think it may be said that 
the blood of Charles Sumner, spilled upon the floor 
of the Senate because he dared to oppose the slave- 
power of the South, and to interpose in the path of 



298 EULOGIES IN U. S. CONGRESS.' 

its progress, was the seed that produced general 
emancipation ; the result of which is too well known 
to need comment. It spoke silently, but effectively, 
of the cruelty and iniquities of that abominable 
institution. Notwithstanding that dastardly assault, 
his valor was not cooled, neither was his determina- 
tion abated, to resist the advancing steps of that 
2)ou'er which was the source of so much distraction 
to the Republic, and disgrace to the nineteenth cen- 
tury. Sir, I Ijelieve in a Providence that shapes 
events and controls circumstances. His hand is most 
conspicuously seen in the life and death of the la- 
mented senator. Though he was a martyr to the 
cause of freedom and universal liberty, he neverthe- 
less lived long enough to see the struggles of his 
eventful public life crowned with victory, and the 
broken shackles of the slave scattered at his feet, 
before he was gathered to his fathers. The emanci- 
pated and enfranchised will pay grateful homage to 
his memory in life, and, dying, bequeath the name of 
him who was their benefactor, as a befitting one for 
the reverence and adoration of posterity. 

" Farewell I if ever fondest prayer 
For others' weal availed on high, 
Ours will not be lost in air, 
But waft thy name beyond the sky." 

Mr. Speaker, the intentness of his thought on the 
subject of his mission, for which, apparently, he was 
born, clung to him to the ebbing moments of liis life. 



EULOGIES IN U. S. CONGRESS. 299 

When weary, and longing for rest, having his eyes 
fixed upon that " mansion not made witli hands, 
eternal in the heavens," and just preceding his final 
step, over the threshold of time, into the boundless 
space of eternity, he uttered, in dying accents, yet 
with an eloquence more persuasive and impressive 
than ever, these words : " Do not let the civil-rights 
bill fail." How remarkable the connecting incidents 
of his history ! This is particularly apparent when 
we recall the fact, that he began as an advocate of 
human rights, continued through an eventful career 
the same ; and closing his last hours on earth, facing 
the judgment-seat of the very God, he looked back 
for a moment, and repeated these words, which will 
be ever memorable : " Do not let the civil-rights bill 
fail." This sentence, we trust, will prove more po- 
tent and availing, in securing equality before the law 
for all men, than any of his former efforts. This is 
not the proper time, neither is the occasion propitious, 
for further comment on that dying appeal. I there- 
fore, with trembling hands and a grateful heart, lay 
it gently in the lap of the Muses, that it may be 
wrought into imperishable history, as an additional 
evidence of his sincerity in life, and his devotion to 
the grand principle of equal rights, even in the 
embrace of death. He can never be repaid for the 
services he has rendered the Repul)lic. No libation, 
adoration, or sacrifice can equal the beneficence 
and magnitude of the services he has rendered 
liis country and mankind. As for my race, and me, 
his memory will ever be precious to us. We will 



300 EULOGIES IN U. S. CONGRESS. 

embalm it among the choicest gems of our lecoUec- 
tion. Yes, — 

"Let laurels, drench'd in pure Parnassian dews, 
Reward his memory, dear to every Muse, 
Who with a courage of unshaken root, 
In honor's field advancing his firm foot, 
Plants it upon the line that Justice draws, 
And will prevail, or perish in her cause. 
'Tis to the virtue of such men man owes 
His portion in the good that Heaven bestows." 

Now, sir, my grateful task is done. This humble 
but heartfelt tribute I lay at the base of the broken 
column, in token of him who was an eminent states- 
man, renowned philanthropist, and devoted friend to 
the friendless. " May he rest in peace ! " 



BY HON. G. F. HOAR. 

Me. Speaker, — I should prefer to leave this 
theme to those of my colleagues who have been 
longer and more conspicuous in the public service. 
But the community which I represent was bound to 
our great senator by a tie closer, I think, than that 
of any other. In the city of Worcester he first 
pul)licly devoted himself to the great cause to which 
his life was consecrated. From that day to his 
death, for more than twenty-five years, through his 
eventful career, through all the obloquy and strife 
and hatred which it was his lot to encounter, that 



EULOGIES IN U. S. CONGRESS. 301 

people have loved and honored him ; scarcely ever 
divided from liim in judgment, never in principle, 
never in affection ; and it seems to me fitting, that, in 
this season of funeral sorrow and of funeral triumph, 
its voice should not be silent. Charles Sumner's 
public life was spent in one place, the Senate-cham- 
ber ; and was devoted to one cause, the equality of 
all men before the law. For that arena, and that 
great argument, his first forty years must be con- 
sidered only as preparation. He came to manhood, 
leaving Harvard with the best training which his 
native State had to bestow. He was a model of 
manly beauty and of manly strength, attracting the 
eye in every assembly, capable of great athletic feats, 
and able to sustain the most severe and continuous 
study. To the best American training he added 
what foreign travel could give. He mastered the 
principal modern languages, and formed intimacies 
with the distinguished men of Europe, especially 
with those of his own profession. He became a 
learned lawyer, editing the twenty volumes of 
Vesey, jun., himself reporting the decisions of liis 
friend Judge Story, and contributing many original 
essays to " The American Jurist." His great native 
powers of oratory, the indispensable instruments of 
his future service, he trained and manifested by 
numerous public addresses ; in which, thus early, he 
unfolded the principles and opinions from which 
he never swerved. The full vigor of his intellect 
he retained till his death. But that majestic elo- 
quence which inspired and captivated large masses 

26 



302 EULOGIES IN U. S. CONGRESS. 

of men, as he wove the lessons of liistoiy, the 
ornaments of literature, the commandments of law, 
human and divine, into his burning and impassioned 
plea for the slave, belonged only to his j^outh. He 
never fully regained it after the assault upon him in 
the Senate-chamber. His vast learning and reten- 
tive memory were a marvel. I remember, in my boy- 
hood hearing an eminent scholar style liim the 
Encyclopaedia of Boston. 

He was famiUar with all heroic literature. His 
style, without much variety, reminded you of some 
of the statelier passages of Burke, whom in person 
he resembled ; resembling also, in its affluence of cita- 
tion, that " field of the cloth of gold," the prose of 
John Milton. Old men who had trod the highest 
paths of fame recognized the promise of the youth, 
and sought his companionship. Probably no young- 
man in America ever counted such a host of illus- 
trious friends. Among them were Kent, the greatest 
modern writer on jurisprudence, unless we join Kent 
himself in preferring Story ; and De Tocqueville, 
that wisest of Frenchmen, who has understood the 
institutions of America better than any man since 
the men who builded them, and from whom Simmer 
received that maxim in wliich he delighted, " Life is 
neither a pain nor a pleasure, but a serious business, 
which it is our duty to carry through, and to termi- 
nate, with honor." Among them were some, still 
alive, famous in poetry, in letters, and in science, 
Avhose unfailing affection cheered the darkest hours 
of his life. Among them were four, — John Picker- 



EULOGIES IN U. S. CONGRESS. 303 

ing-, the illustrious scholar whom Sumner called the 
leader in the revival of learning in America, com- 
paring him to Erasmus ; Washington Allston, Story, 
and Channing, — whom he commemorated in that 
wonderful oration of eulogy, in which, taking them as 
representatives and examples, he set forth the four 
ideals which he kept ever before his own gaze, — 
knowledge, justice, beauty, love. 

Such was Charles Sumner when he was called to 
choose his side in the great battle of which our 
nation was to be the scene. Never did hero, martyr, 
or saint choose more bravely or worthily. The party 
to which he had belonged, dominant for a genera- 
tion in Massachusetts, was just wresting the national 
authority from the grasp of its ancient rival. The 
victory of either was the victory of slavery. Turn- 
ing his back on the victors, he chose the conquered 
cause. Fond of power, fitted for its exercise, he 
chose the side of weakness. Surrounded by wealth, 
he chose the cause of the poor. Rich in friends, he 
became the defender of the friendless. Favorite of 
that cultivated society, his great heart went out in 
sympathy for the ignorant and degraded slave. He 
joined himself to a small political association, not 
strong enough to carry three districts, who made 
opposition to slavery the cardinal doctrine of their 
creed. The indignation of Massachusetts at the 
passage of the compromise measures of 1850, espe- 
cially the Fugitive-slave Bill, for which the Whig 
administration of Millard Fillmore was responsible, 
enabled the Free-soil party, combining with the 



304 EULOGIES IN U. S. CONGRESS. 

Democratic minority, to elect Mr, Sumner to the 
Senate, where he took his seat in 1851. From that 
time forth he was the undoubted leader of the 
political opposition to slavery. His speeches stirred 
the public heart and conscience to their depths, and 
were the arsenal from Avhich the most effective arti- 
cles came. The sure instinct of slavery did not err 
when it recognized him as its implacable foe. At 
last a man had come to the Senate to whom the 
ideal higher law was real ; on whom threats and 
blandishments alike were lost ; who would not buy 
popularity or office, who would not buy success for 
liis party, or even safety or prosperity for his country, 
by injustice. There was no mistake about him. 
The minions of tyranny sought eagerly for his de- 
struction ; thinking, that, with hira, the new-born 
movement for freedom would perish. But, fools and 
blind, they saw not that the eternal forces were 
behind him. They thought if they could but silence 
that bugle-note, the music of liberty would die out 
over the land. They thought if they could but 
strike down that sentinel on the rampart, the awak- 
ening nation would turn itself to its long sleep. 
They thought if they could but stifle the clarion 
voice of the herald of the day, the morning itself 
would not dawn. 

The secret of Charles Sumner's power lay in two 
qualities, which he impressed .on this people in larger 
measure than any other man of his time, — his 
conscientiousness and his faith. Others — a good 
many — equalled him in eloquence : others — a few — 



EULOGIES IN U. S. CO-NGRESS. 305 

equalled him in scholarship. But he alone was the 
interpreter of the conscience of this people. To every 
proposition he applied the inexoral)le test, Is it right? 
is it absolutely just ? Unless his Puritanic sense of 
rectitude was satisfied, he would not yield. No 
argument of political expediency, no whisper of 
administrative caution, no deference to associate, no 
regard for venerated authorities, no consideration 
of fitness of occasion, no fear for himself, would in- 
duce him to abate one jot of his indignant denuncia- 
tion. With this trait, he could not be otherwise than 
the lifelong foe of slavery. There was no optimism 
in his nature. He never turned his gaze away from 
evil, or looked on it but to hate it and to strike it. 
But in the darkest days of war, as those darker days 
worse than war, when slavery ruled, he never lost 
his sublime faith in the triumph of justice, truth, and 
equality, wrought out in the Republic by the power 
of a free people. The secret of his power, and the 
rule of his public life, will be found in two of his 
own sentences, — one almost the opening sentence in 
his first great public discourse ; the other, which I 
heard him utter toward the close of his life, in a de- 
bate on the Civil-rights Bill, that great and crown- 
ing measure of justice, in care for which he forgot 
himself in the very hour of death : " Never aim at 
aught which is not right ; persuaded, that, without 
this, every possession will become an evil and a 
shame ; " " Trust the Repubhc, and the ideas which 
are its strength and safety." No eulogy of Charles 
Sumner will be complete which leaves out his faults. 

26* 



306 EULOGIES IN U. S. CONGRESS. 

When common men die, we may invoke the adage, 
"Nil de mortius nisi bonum; " or utter that sadder 
cry of human frailt}', " Jam parce sepulto." But of 
this man we can say the whole truth. Two grave 
defects marred the symmetry of his moral and intel- 
lectual nature. The first was a certain want of pro- 
portion or perspective in his mental vision, which 
made him exaggerate the evil or good qualities of 
men whom he had occasion to blame or praise, or the 
importance of measures with which he was concerned. 
In saying this, we should not forget how often time 
has brought around the popular judgment to his own. 
The other was a graver. In liim the egotism fostered 
by a long senatorial career seems to have been nat- 
ural. He possessed an inordinate confidence in his 
own judgments. He was intolerant of difference or 
of oi^position. It was hard for men, his equals in 
station, themselves accustomed to respect, conscious 
of equal desire for the general welfare, to submit to 
his impatient and imperious criticism. What he saw, 
he seemed to himself to see with al)Solute clearness 
and certainty. He could not understand the state 
of mind of a man who did not see it as he did ; but 
this, his greatest fault, was a protection to him in 
the warfare in which he was engaged. Imagine jNIr. 
Sumner in Washington, from 1851 to 1857, almost 
alone, an object of general hatred, receiving by every 
mail threats of violence and assassination, possessed 
with a modest distrust of his own convictions, and 
exhibiting an amiable deference to the opinions of 
other people. Nothing but the absolute certainty of 



EULOGIES IN U. S. CONGRESS. 80 < 

his cause, and in himself, could have sustained him 
in those days of obloquy and peril. I have spoken 
of his injustice to his associates, and his intolerance 
of opposition ; but the harshness and bitterness with 
which, for the time, he spoke of men who opposed 
the measures he had at heart, he never felt toward 
mere personal antagonists. I may surprise some per- 
sons who have not carefully studied Mr. Sumner ; 
but I am sure of the assent of those who knew bun 
best, when I declare that he was as free as any man 
I ever knew from personal hatreds, and that his 
lofty and generous nature was absolutely incapable 
of revenge. Let the man whom he consider: d to 
have most wronged him, or to have most wronged 
the Republic, but unite with him heartily in any 
cause which was dear to him, and the bitterest es- 
trangements were forgotten. 

Who shall say that he thought more highly of 
himself than he deserved? — that he demanded for 
himself, or his opinion, greater consideration than 
would now be accorded to them by the judgment of 
mankind ? In the words of that fine sentence of the 
Ethica of Aristotle, applied by the English historian 
to the younger Pitt, " He thought himself worthy 
of great things ; being, in truth, worthy." There 
was, at least, nothing petty and mean in these traits. 
They were the foibles of a lofty and noble nature. 
To his own self not always just, — 

" Bound in the bonds which all men share, 
Confess the failinc^s, as we must, 
The lion's mark is always there." 



308 EULOGIES IN U. S. CONGEESS. 

At any rate, there he was to be seen and known 
of all men. There was no secrecy in his nature. 
He was the soul of truth. His public and private 
life corresponded. Of one thing those who love him 
are secure. History will lay bare no secret which 
will tarnish the whiteness of his fame. His corre- 
spondence, his conversation, the secrets of his cham- 
ber, may be made known to mankind ; no intrigue, 
no dissimulation, no artifice, no selfish ambition, no 
impure thought or act, shall be found. 

" Whatever record leap to light, 
He never shall be shamed." 

He was hearty and generous in his friendships. No 
man took greater delight in other men's services to 
freedom, or rewarded them with a more precious and 
bountiful commendation. To receive his praise, for 
any service to human lil)erty, was like being knighted 
by Coeur de Lion or Henry V. on the field of battle. 
He said lately, that the happiest period of his life 
was when he was a student at law. The time of the 
close of the war must have been equally so. He had 
seen the great desire of his life fulfilled. The eyes 
which had ached with sorrow and with toil had gazed 
upon the glory and the beauty of the harvest. The 
martyr of free speech, the solitary and despised 
champion of liberty, had lived to be the honored 
leader of the Senate. The friendship and confidence 
of Lincoln, who knew and loved the noble nature of 
the man ; the gratitude of the American people ; the 
recollection of great tasks successfully achieved ; the 



EULOGIES IN U. S. CONGRESS. 309 

affection of hosts of friends ; the expectation of new 
and most congenial employments in the country's 
service ; the employments of literature ; the resources 
of art, — every thing that could adorn, every thing that 
could delight, the remainder of a life scarce past its 
vigorous prime, seemed to be his. But fate ordered 
it otherwise. The voice of duty, obeyed at prime, 
called him to new sacrifices and new stripes until the 
end. 

The last morning on which he came to the Senate- 
chamber, to the inquiry of a friend who met him, he 
answered, " I am tired, tired." As I heard of it 
just afterward, I thought of a sentence in that mag- 
nificent opening passage of his first great discourse, 
in which he seems to dedicate himself to the service 
of the Republic : " We must not fold our hands in 
slumber, nor abide content with the past. To each 
generation is committed its peculiar task ; nor does 
the heart, which responds to the call of duty, find 
rest except in the grave." Ah ! heart so dauntless 
and so tender, well hast thou kept that early vow. 
Ever responding to the call of duty, from the day 
when Massachusetts gave thee to thy country, in the 
fulness of thy youthful promise, till that saddest 
moment when we saw thee borne, cold in death, from 
the portals of the Capitol, thou hast known no rest. 
At last thy country gives thee back to thy native 
Commonwealth, to sleep in her holy Pilgrim soil with 
tlie kindred dust of the sons, many and brave, who 
]iave well obeyed the lessons he taught them in their 
youth ; with Samuel Adams, and Otis, and the elder 



310 EULOGIES IN U. S. CONGRESS. 

and younger Quincy, and John Adams, and his iUus- 
trious son. Like them, he learned at her knees the 
lesson of liberty ; like them, he encountered hatred 
and strife and peril ; like them, he lived to see the 
seed he had sown bearing its abundant harvest ; and, 
like them, his grateful country shall preserve his 
fame. 

" For the memorial of virtue is immortal, because 
it is known with God and with men. When it is 
present, men take example at it ; and when it is gone, 
they desire it : it weareth a crown, and triumpheth 
forever, having gotten the victory striving for uude- 
filed rewards." 



BY HON. L. Q. C. LAMAR. 

Mr. Speaker, — I rise to second the resolutions 
presented by the member from Massachusetts. I be- 
lieve that they express a sentiment which pervades 
the hearts of all the people whose representatives are 
here assembled. Strange as, in looking back upon 
the fact, the assertion may seem ; impossible as it 
would have been ten jears ago to make it, — it is 
not the less true, that to-day Mississippi regrets the 
death of Charles Sumner, and sincerely unites in pay- 
ing honors to his memory : not because of the splen- 
dor of his intellect, though in him was extinguished 
one of the brightest lights which have illustrated the 
councils of the government for nearly a quarter of a 



EULOGIES IN U. S. CONGKESS. 311 

century ; not because of the high culture, the elegant 
scholarship, and the varied learning, which revealed 
themselves so clearly in all his public efforts as to 
justify the application to him of Johnson's felicitous 
expression, " He touched nothing which he did not 
adorn," — not this, though these are qualities by no 
means, it is to be feared, so common in public places 
as to make their disappearance, in even a single 
instance, a matter of indifference ; but because of 
those peculiar and strongly-marked moral traits of his 
character, which gave the coloring to the whole tenor 
of his singularly dramatic public career, making 
himself, to a part of his countrymen, the object of as 
deep and passionate hostility as to another he was 
one of enthusiastic admiration : and which are not 
the less the cause that now unites all these parties, 
so widely different, in a common sorrow to-day over 
his lifeless remains. Charles Sumner was born with 
an instinctive love of freedom; and was educated, 
from his earliest infancy, to the belief that freedom 
is the natural and indefeasible right of every intelli- 
gent being having the outward form of man. In 
him, in fact, the creed seems to have been something 
more than a doctrine imbibed from teachers, or a 
result of education. It was a grand intuitive truth, 
inscribed in blazing letters upon the tablet of his 
inner consciousness, to deny which would have been 
for him to deny that he himself existed ; and, along 
with this all-controlling love of freedom, he possessed 
a moral sensibility keenly intense and vivid, — a con- 
scientiousness which would never permit him to 



312 EULOGIES IN U. S. CONGRESS. 

swerve, by the breadth of a hair, from what he pictured 
to himself as the path of duty. Thus were combined 
in him the characteristics which have in all ages 
given to religion her martyrs, and to patriotism her 
self-sacrificing heroes. Let me do this great man 
the justice which, amid the excitements of the 
struggle between the sections, now past, many 
have been disposed to deny him. In his fiery zeal, 
and his earnest warfare against the wrong as he 
viewed it, there entered no enduring personal ani- 
mosity toward the men whose lot it was to be born 
to the system which he denounced. It has been the 
kindness of the sympathy, which, in these later years, 
he has displaj^ed to the impoverished and suffering 
people of the Southern States that has unveiled to me 
the generous and tender heart which beat beneath the 
bosom of the zealot, and has forced me to yield him 
the tribute of my respect, I might even say of my ad- 
miration. Nor, in the manifestation of this, has there 
been any thing which a proud and sensitive people, 
smarting under a sense of recent discomfiture and 
present suffering, might not frankly accept, or which 
Avould give them just cause to suspect its sincerity. 
For though he raised his voice, as soon as he believed 
the momentous issues of this great military conflict 
were decided, in favor of amnesty to the vanquished, 
and though he stood forward ready to welcome back as 
brothers, and to re-establish in their rights as citizens, 
those whose valor had so nearly riven asunder the 
Union which he loved, he always insisted that the 
most ample protection, and the largest safeguards, 



EULOGIES IN U. S. CONGRESS. 313 

should be thrown around the liberties of the newly- 
enfranchised African race. Though he knew very 
well that of his conquered fellow-citizens of the South, 
by far the larger portion of even those who most 
heartily acquiesced in, and desired, the abolition of 
slavery, seriously questioned the expediency of in- 
vesting in a single day, and without any preliminary 
tutelage, so vast a body of inexperienced and unin- 
structed men with the full rights of citizenship and 
suffrage, he would tolerate no halfway measures 
upon a point to him so vital. Indeed, immecUately 
after the war, while other minds were occupying 
themselves with different theories of reconstruction, 
he did not hesitate to impress most emphatically on 
the administration, not only in public, but in the 
confidence of private intercourse, his uncompro- 
mising resolution to oppose to the last every scheme 
which should fail to provide the surest guaranties 
for the personal freedom and political rights of the 
race which he had undertaken to protect. Whether 
these measures show him to be a practical statesman, 
or a theoretical enthusiast, is a question on which 
any decision we may pronounce to-day must wait 
the inevitable revision of posterity. The spirit of 
magnanimity, therefore, which breathes in his utter- 
ances, and manifests itself in all his acts affecting 
the South, was as evidently honest as it was grateful 
to the feelings of those to whom it was displayed. 
It was certainly a gracious act toward the South, 
though, unhappily, it jarred upon the sensibilities of 
the people at the other extreme of the Union, to pro- 

27 



314 EULOGIES IN U. S. CONGRESS. 

pose to erase from the banners of the national arm}'- 
the mementoes of the bloody internal struggle, 
which might be regarded as assailing the pride, or 
wounding the sensibilities, of the Southern people. 
That proposal will never be forgotten by that people 
so long as the name of Charles Sumner lives in the 
memory of man. But while it touched the heart, 
and elicited her profound gratitude, her people would 
not have asked of the North such an act of self-renun- 
ciation. Conscious that they themselves were ani- 
mated by devotion to constitutional liberty, and that 
the brightest pages of history are replete with evi- 
dences of the depth and sincerity of that devotion, 
they can but cherish the recollections of the battles 
fought, and the victories Avon, in defence of a hope- 
less cause ; and respecting, as all true and brave men 
must, the martial spirit with which the men of the 
North vindicated the integrity of the Union, and their 
devotion to the principles of human freedom, they 
do not ask, they do not wish, the North to strike the 
mementoes of heroism and victory from either records 
or monuments or battle-flags. They would rather 
that both sections should gather up the glories won by 
each section ; not envious, but proud of each other, 
and regard them as a common heritage of American 
valor. Let us hope that future generations, when 
they remember the deeds of heroism and devotion 
done on both sides, will si>eak not of Northern 
prowess or Southern courage, but of the heroism and 
fortitude of Americans in a war of ideas, — a war 
in which each section signalized its consecration to 



EULOGIES IN U. S. CONGRESS. 315 

the principles, as each understocKl them, of American 
liberty, and of the Constitution received from their 
fathers. It was my misfortune, perhaps my fault, 
personally never to have known this eminent philan- 
thropist and statesman. The impulse was often 
strong upon me to go to him, and offer my hand, and 
my heart with it, and to express to him my thanks 
for his kind and considerate course toward the people 
with whom I am identified. If I did not yield to that 
impulse, it was because the thought occurred that 
other days were coming in which a demonstration 
might be more opportune, and less liable to miscon- 
struction. Suddenly, and without premonition, a 
day has come at last, to which, for such a purpose, 
there is no to-morrow. JNIy regret is, therefore, inten- 
sified by the thought that I failed to speak to him 
out of the fulness of my heart, while there was yet 
time. How often is it that death thus brings una- 
vailingly back to our remembrance opportunities 
unimproved, in which generous overtures prompted 
by the heart remain unoffered, frank avowals which 
rise to the lips remain unspoken, and the injustice 
and wrong with which conscience reproached us re- 
main unrepaired ! Charles Sumner in life believed 
that all occasion for strife and distrust between the 
North and South had passed away, and there no longer 
remained an}^ cause for continued estrangement be- 
tween the two sections of our country. Are there 
not many of us who believe the same tiling ? Is not 
that the common sentiment, or, if not, ouglit it not 
to be, of the great mass of our people, North and 



olG EULOGIES IN U. S. CONGRESS. 

South ? — bound to each other by a common Consti- 
tution, destined to live together under a common 
government, forming unitedly but a single member 
of the great family of nations. Shall we not, at last, 
endeavor to grow toward each other in heart, as we 
already are indissolubly linked to each other in for- 
tunes ? Shall we not, whilst honoring the memory of 
this great champion of human liberty, this feeling 
sympathizer with human sorrow, this earnest pleader 
for the exercise of human tenderness and heavenly 
charity, lay aside the concealments which serve only 
to perpetuate misunderstandings and distrust, and 
frankly confess that on both sides we most earnestly 
desire to be one, — one not merely in political or- 
ganizations, one not merely in identity of institu- 
tions, one not merely in community of language and 
literature and traditions and country ; but, more and 
better than all that, one also in feeling and in heart ? 
Am I mistaken in this ? Do the concealments of 
which I speak still cover animosities which neither 
time nor reflection, nor the march of events, have yet 
sufficed to subdue? I cannot believe it. Since I 
have been here, I have scrutinized your sentiments 
as expressed not merely in public debate, but in the 
abandon of personal confidence. I know well the 
sentiments of these my Southern friends, whose hearts 
are so infolded that the feeling of each is the feeling of 
all ; and I see on both sides only the seeming of a 
constraint, which each apparently hesitates to dismiss. 
The South prostrate, exhausted, drained of her hfe- 
bluod as well as of her material resources, yet still 



I 



EULOGIES IN U. S. CONGIIESS. 317 

lionoraljle and true, accepts the bitter award of the 
bloody arbitrament without reservation, resolutely 
determined to abide the result with chivalrous 
fidelity ; yet, as if struck dumb by the magnitude of 
her reverses, she suffers on in silence. The North, 
exultant in her triumph, and elated by success, still 
cherishes, as we are assured, a heart full of magnani- 
mous emotions toward her disarmed and discomfited 
antagonist ; and yet, as if under some mysterious 
spell, her words and acts are words and acts of suspi- 
cion and distrust. Would that the spirit of the 
illustrious dead whom we lament to-day could speak 
from the grave to both parties to this deplorable dis- 
cord, in tones which should reach each and every 
heart throughout this broad territory ! My country- 
men, know one another, and you will love one an- 
other. 

27* 



ADDEESSES IN EANEUIL HALL, BOSTON. 



HIS HONOR MAYOR S. C. COBB. 

Fellow-Citizens, — The lifeless form of Charles 
Sumner is now on its way from the national Capitol 
to Massachusetts, m the honorable and affectionate 
custody of his peers in office. Charles Sumner, the 
statesman and patriot, the scholar, orator, pliilan- 
thropist, — a great and good man, — is dead. The 
whole civilized world takes note of the solemn event. 
The whole country, in its great cities, its scattered 
villages, its roadside farmhouses, and its lowliest 
cabins, pauses, reflects, and mourns. 

But Boston occupies the place of chief mourner. 
His character and fame are the property of the whole 
nation ; but, in his personal interests and affections, 
he was and is ours. His father was an honored 
magistrate of Boston. In these squares and alleys 
of ours the boy, destined to such eminence, pursued 
. his childish games. He was educated in our schools, 
and in the university on our borders. In his youth 

318 



ADDRESSES IN FANEUIL HALL. 819 

and early manhood lie sat at the feet of our 
Quincy and Story and Shaw, our Adams and Web- 
ster and Everett and Channing. Here the future 
senator received the influences from without, and 
kindled the aspirations within, that, in due time, 
resulted in that brilliant career, that ' noble and 
unspotted life, that unwearied, undivided, and pre- 
eminent service for truth and right, for freedom and 
humanity. 

Twenty-three years ago he went forth from among 
us to take his part in the great arena of public life ; 
in the early prime of manhood, and without expe- 
I'ience in affairs, yet a stalwart man, and full of intel- 
lectual vigor and generous enthusiasm. But yesterday 
he was a power in the land, standing conspicuous 
among the foremost in influence, and in the public 
respect and confidence ; one to whose slightest word 
a nation listened with deference. To-day his right 
arm has fallen cold and motionless; his tongue is 
stilled ; his intelligence is quenched to our mortal 
apprehension ; his great soul gives no sign ; and his 
crumbling body is being borne back to us to be laid 
to its rest by our hands, within the shadow of our 
city's domes and towers, and of the home he loved 
so well. His grave will ]:>e another added to our 
shrines of the illustrious dead ; which we and our 
children, and our children's children, and citizens 
from Western prairies and Southern savannas, and 
travellers from foreign lands, will visit with rev- 
erent steins, to meditate on departed greatness and 
worth. 



820 ADDRESSES IN FANEUIL HALL. 

We do well, fellow-citizens, — we could not do 
less, or otherwi::;e, — to gather to-day in this our lii.-- 
toric hall. We come to mingle our sympathies and 
tears under the pressure of a great affliction. AVe 
come to renew our appreciation of an illuotrious 
character and life, and reldudle our aspu'ations for 
the best and loftiest things. We come to give 
thanks to the Giver of all good for this bright and 
pure light permitted to shine upon us so long, and to 
bow in submission to the decree that has now with- 
drawn it. - We come to pay our tribute — not the 
last tribute, but the first — to the sacred memory of 
one of our best and greatest men. The solemn grief 
of this hour for the death of Charles Sumner reveals 
to us how much — how much more, even, than Ave 
knew — we did in our hearts honor and revere him 
while living. 

Resolutions will now be presented for your accept- 
ance; which, I trust, will be found to embody, as far 
as mere language can, the sentiments with which the 
sad occasion has filled the minds of all of us, and 
of the multitudes around, whom these walls could 
not contain. 

I shall then ask your silent and reverent attention 
to such remarks as may be offered by men who, as 
the personal friends or the life-long associates, or 
the intellectual peers, of the deceased, are qualified to 
F'peak of his character and services, and to impress 
upon us the lesson of the hour. 



ADDRESSES IN FANEUIL HALL. 321 



HON. RICHARD H. DANA, Jun. 

Mr. Mayor, — On such a day as this, when this 
Cradle of Liberty is draped as the chamber of death, 
in the presence of these tearful eyes and swelling 
hearts, my words may well be few. Happy indeed 
would be the man who could add any thing to the 
expression of the scene. 

I am aware, sir, that I owe the honor and privilege 
of my post, this morning, to the fact that you and 
some others remember that I have been a friend of 
Mr. Sumner from my boyhood to the last. He was 
indeed a friend, I will not say faithful and just, 
but jDartial and kind, to me. And to-day it is most 
fitting that I should restrict myself to a little testi- 
mony of what I know and remember, which is not 
known by the rising generation. I can bear witness, 
that, in the university, his life was intensely studi- 
ous ; that, at the age of twenty-tln-ee, he had secured 
the reputation of a scholar and thinker, and the 
respect and friendship of eminent men in jurispru- 
dence and letters. When he went to Europe, at the 
age of twenty-six, he bore credentials from the first 
men of America to the first men of Europe ; for they 
knew that he would justify all that they could say 
of him. And his great success in all parts of the Old 
World was owing not merely to his genial social 
qualities, his affectionate heart, and his varied accom- 
l)lishments. There are many who know, (hat, in Lon- 
don and Paris and Vienna and Rome, his days and 



822 ADDRESSES IN FAN^UIL HALL. 

nights were as laborious and studious as within th(i 
walls of Harvard University. He commanded the 
respect and the glad attention of the most eminent 
men, holding the most resjDonsible positions in Eu- 
rope. They foresaw m him the great publicist and 
statesman to which time developed him. 

I knew him in various relations, social, profes- 
sional, and literary ; but I pass them all by for tlie 
consideration of the part he took iri organizing the 
great party of freedom in 1848. He had been in- 
different to ordinary politics until the anti-slavery 
cause, passing out of the region of mere moral effort, 
shaped itself into a movement of practical politics. 

It was at his chambers in Court Street, that that 
small band of men was in the habit of gathering pre- 
paratory to the Buffalo Convention of 1848. And I 
would pause a moment, sir, to pay my tribute 
of respect — in which I know that you, Mr. Vice- 
President of the United States, will heartily join — 
to the disinterestedness, the courage, the fidelit}^, of 
the men who began that undertaldng, in those dark 
days when it seemed but hopeless, and promised little 
else than labor and sacrifice. 

I recall the faces and voices — some of them have 
passed away — of Mr. Adams, Henry Wilson, Charles 
Allen of Worcester, Stephen C. Phillips of Salem, 
Samuel Hoar of Concord, and his son. Dr. Palfrey 
of Cambridge, John A. Andrew, Horace j\Iann ; 
but I will not attempt to complete the roll. Our 
thoughts to-day are directed to one of its youngest, 
who became the most eminent of all. 



ADDRESSES IN FANEUIL HALL. 323 

He has the right to have said of him what Burke 
said of Charles James Fox in tril)ute to his efforts 
to save and protect the suffering East Indians from 
the oppression of the East India Company: "He 
put to the hazard his ease, his interests, his friend- 
ship, even his darling popularity, for the benefit of a 
race of men he had never seen, and who could not 
even give him thanks. He hurt those who were able 
to requite a benefit, or punish .an injmy. He well 
knew what snares might be spread about his feet by 
personal animosity, political intrigue, and, possibly, 
by popular delusion. Tiiis is the path that all 
heroes have trod before him. He was traduced and 
maligned for his supposed motives. He well knew, 
that as in the Roman triumphal processions, so in all 
public service, obloqu}^ is an essential ingredient m 
the composition of all true glory." 

Social ostracism had fallen upon him in a measure 
which this generation can hardly credit. Although 
it wounded his sensibilities in many directions, it 
never affected his action. And I know, as an inti- 
mate friend, that it did not affect his feelings 
towards individuals. He did not deal with men as 
units, as the chemist deals with the ocean by its 
drops. He dealt with them by classes and races. 
He raised up allies or opponents, friends or enemies, 
hj masses, in obedience to those great laws of opin- 
ion and passion with which he dealt. 

INIr. Mayor, I can especially testify to the manner 
in which he bore himself during the most powerful 
trial of self-respect and dignity which I ever knew 



324 ADDRESSES IN FANEUIL HALL. 

any man subjected to. I refer to tliat period when 
his first election to the Senate was pending before 
the legislature. It was pending for weeks and 
months ; and every thing seemed at stake on that 
issue. He was tried by the advice of anxious and 
zealous friends, and by the hostility, reproaches, and 
sneers of the enemies of his cause. He was urged 
to see this man, or that man, or allow such and such 
persons to be brought to him. It was represented 
to him that if he would meet more freely with those 
who had the decision in their power, and not hold 
himself aloof ; if he would say, by pen or tongue, this 
or that word, — the result might be secured. But 
we who stood about him know that he was firm and 
immovable as that rock in the harbor of Plymouth, 
surrounded by the dashings of a December sea. 
Neither by what he did or did not do, or said or did 
not say, did he contribute any thing to the result. 
He said, " Let them say or think that I am reserved 
or haughty or impracticable. I know it is self- 
respect. And I know that my usefulness in the post 
depends greatly upon the way in which I attain it." 
And when, at length, the hour of triumph came, he did 
not allow himself to regard it as a personal triumph 
over any individuals, or small bodies of men, what- 
ever might have been his relations to them. And I 
well remember — it is as fresh to me as if it were 
yesterday — going into his chamber on the day after 
the election, and noticing an expression of sadness 
on his noble countenance. The newspapers of the 
clay were strewn upon the floor ; and he said with a 



ADDEESSES IN FANEUIL HALL. 825 

sigli, " All ! when I read that cannon are firing, and 
bells rmging, in New England, and on the western 
reserve of Ohio, I am inexpressibly sad at the 
thought that I cannot, I know I cannot, meet the 
public expectations in this cause." 

O Mr. Mayor ! O my friends before me ! could 
he have foreseen then the scenes of these last days ; 
could he have foreseen, that, in three and twenty 
years, the news of his death would be met by the 
tears and sobs of four millions of an enfranchised 
race ; that his seat in the Senate, from which he 
should once be driven by violence, would be draped 
in mourning by the hands of his colleagues, and 
adorned with the freshest flowers of the Southern 
soil ; could he have foreseen that the hews of this 
event was to be spread by the sensitive wires, in a 
few hours, through the civihzed world, and be re- 
sponded to by tributes of honor and praise. from 
more than one continent, and from the islands of the 
sea ; that business and thought would be arrested 
throughout this Republic, and held, as by a spell, 
for days; that flags would be worn at half-mast, 
and bells tolled, in Charleston, S.C. ; that Inde- 
pendence Hall in Philadelphia would respectfully 
solicit the honor of holding, for a few hoiu-s, his 
remains on their funeral march ; that the great 
emporium of New York could not be satisfied in the 
eagerness of its demand to do him honor ; and that 
liere, in his own Commonwealth and city, the entire 
community should unite, past differences forgotten 
and buried, in the most tender and respectful 

28 



326 ADDRESSES IN PANEUTL HALL. 

tributes, — ah ! my friends, his friends, if he could 
have foreseen this, or the one-hundredth part of 
this, he would not have feared he could not meet 
the public expectations. 

I have desired, sir, to contribute my testimony to 
some of these events now belonging to the past. 
It is not best for me to attempt more. If I should 
ever think of analyzing his qualities and powers, it 
would not be here and now. I leave all that to 
those who are called, to-day, to give utterance to 
the thoughts suited to the occasion. One of the 
resolutions says truly, that he was faithful to the 
material interests and the welfare of the State and 
city. This is true ; but it is also true that he always 
made them secondary, as they are, to the great 
moral questions on which our national life depends. 
In the words of a poet, — never put in print, but 
which fell upon my ear in this hall a few weeks ago, 
— whose presence we acknowledge with gratitude 
to-day, and whom the friends of Charles Sumner 
now will more than ever love and revere [Mr. R. 
W. Emerson, who was present on the platform], — 

" For what avail 
The plough and sail, 
Or land or life, 
If freedom fail V " 

The contemplation of a great character is always 
elevating and ennoliling. Ilis moral and intellec- 
tual nature was constructed upon a large scale. His 
mind belonged to the comjirehensive order ; but it 



ADDRESSES IN FANEDTL HALL. 327 

was the mysterious j^ower of will, the more subtle 
m(3ral energy, and human sympathy, whose seat in' 
the human frame no physiologist has ever been able 
to put his finger upon, that insured to those powers 
their highest and fullest action. There are men 
who fill a wide space in their day, and are soon 
forgotten. It will not be so with Charles Sumner. 
He put no limit to the responsibility he assumed for 
the anti-slavery cause in its darkest days ; and I 
do not believe that posterity will allot him, with a 
grudging hand, his share in the honors of its tri- 
umph. 

But, Mr. Mayor, I must restrain myself from 
attempting to enter upon that field. I cannot take 
m}^ seat, however, without thanking you for giving 
me this opportunity to add a httle testimony, to 
express a few thoughts and feelings, not on his 
account, but my own ; and I will content myself with 
hoping that the resolutions which I have had the 
honor to present will not fall entirely short of 
expressing, in some measure, what this assembly 
desires to place upon the record of this solemn 
season. 

Mr. Dana closed his address by offering the fol- 
Lnving resolutions : — 

It having pleased the almighty Maker of men, and all-^vise 
Disposer of events, to bring to a close the life and labors on 
earth of Charles Sumner, the citizens of his native town, 
assembled in this hall, sacred to the memories of great and 
good men, desiring to express our sorrow for this bereavement, 
and om- gratitude for his life and services, do mianimuiisly 
agree upon these resolutions : — 



328 ADDRESSES IN FANEUIL HALL. 

Resolved, That the benefactions of his public service have 
penetrated to the depths of our civilization, touched the springs 
of our national life, and will be felt for generations in the 
renewed and purified organization of the Republic. 

Resolved, To this great result, affecting humanity itself 
everywhere and in all ages, he contributed not only by what 
he has said and done and suffered in the chamber of the 
Senate, but by stirring and tireless appeals, for thirty years, to 
the conscience and heart, the magnanimity and sensibilities, 
of the whole people of this land. 

Resolved, We recall with special satisfaction his inexhausti- 
ble moral energy, his marvellous intellectual vigor, his untiring 
industry, his varied attainments, the purity of his private 
character, the loftiness of his public purposes, the scholarly 
charm of his life and conversation, the dignity of his bearing, 
his indomitable resolution, a capacity of enthusiasm for right, 
and indignation against wrong, and a civil coiu-age, which 
neither feared nor courted the hate or favor of men. 

Resolved, While we unite with other citizens of our Com- 
monwealth, and of the Republic, in expressions of sorrow for 
such a loss, and satisfaction and pride in such a life and 
service, we have a nearer claim, and more special interest, as 
citizens of Boston, the place of his birth and home, in whose 
institutions he was educated, and to whose peculiar care his 
mortal remains are to be confided. We acknowledge the 
interest he always took in our institutions of education, charity, 
art, science, and letters, and the aid he rendered to them by 
his pen and tongue, his counsels and labors. We recognize 
that his name will add lustre to our history. And we desire 
especially to record our testimony to the fact, that while his 
thougiits were directed, and his powers devoted, to the enfran- 
chisement of a race, the re-organization of our national system, 
the adjustment of om- relations with liberty and law, and to 
our intercourse with foreign jwwers, he never failed, as a public 
agent, in the Senate, to give full attention and conscientious 
labor to the material interests of our city, and to any thmg that 
concerned its dignity or welfare. 



I 

I 



ADDRESSES IN FANEUIL HALL. 329 

Resolved, We heartily approve the action of the State and 
the city, in preparing, for the remains of Charles Sumner a 
public funeral, in which all our people may unite with tlie 
honors it has been the wont of om- city and commvmity to pay 
to its illustrious dead. 

Resolved, That there should be erected a permanent memo- 
rial of Charles Sumner, such as becomes a community not 
unmindful of its duty to its great and good citizens, and fitted 
to keep his character and services before the minds of futm-e 
generations. We recommend that this memorial be one to 
which all, however poor, and of whatever age, race, or party, 
may make contributions. 

Resolved, To carry out the purpose of the preceding resolve, 
the mayor is requested to appoint a committee of fifty citizens. 



HON. J. B. SMITH. 

Mr. Mayor, and Gentlemen, — I would not 
appear before you to-cla}^ to say a word, for I do 
not feel able t-o do it ; and I can only say, Massachu- 
setts has lost a senator, the United States has lost a 
statesman, the world has lost a philanthropist, and I 
have lost a friend. 

I would not trust myself out here before you 
to-day, except for but one reason. I shook Mr. 
Sumner's hand, for the last time, last Sunday even- 
ing, at half-past eight o'clock. He bade me say to 
the people of Massachusetts, through their legis- 
lature, this : " I thank them for removing that stain 
from me ; I thank those that voted for me. Tell 
those that voted against me, that I forgive them all, 

28* 



330 ADDRESSES IN FANEUIL HALL. 

for I know if they knew my heart they would not 
have done it. I knew Massachusetts was brave, and 
wanted to show to the world that it was magnan- 
imous too ; and that was my reason for my action." 

I have felt that the greatest tribute that I could 
pay to liim, for his kindness to me, was simply to 
drop a tear to his memory ; but our honored mayor 
was kind enough to bring me forth to show you the 
fruits of his labor. 

I can go back to the time when I sat under the 
eagle in this hall, and when I saw some one stand on 
this platform ; and I did wish, when I heard certain 
exjiressions, that I could sink. I can go back to my 
boyhood, when I have seen other boys in their sports 
and plays, and I would walk off in the woods, aud 
say, " O God ! why was I born? " 

I can remember, forty-five years ago, on ^ Christ- 
mas Da}', passing through the orchard, and saw a 
silk-worm hanging to the leaf of a tree ; when my 
eyes turned up to my God, and I said, " Why am I 
here ? " There hangs something out of the cold, but 
it will be a butterfly. I took it home, hung it in the 
room, put it where it was warm, and it hatched out 
before the atmosphere was prepared to receive it. I 
lifted the window, and it flew off, but had to return, 
as it could not stand the atmosphere. And just so 
was I brought forth by the eloquence of Charles 
Sumner ; and I have been turned loose on the public 
atmosphere, for, really, I had to suffer intensely ; and 
I could only feel at home, and feel well, when I 
turned back into his presence ; and his arms were 
always open to receive me. [Applause.] 



ADDRESSES TN FANEUIL HALL. 331 

And now, Mr. Maj^or, our ship, in wliicli he has 
commanded, is still adrift. We are standing out now 
in the open sea, with a great storm ; and, in behalf 
of those five millions of people of the United States, 
I heg of you to give us a good man to take hold 
where he left off. [Applause.] 

We are not educated up to that point. We cannot 
s-peak for ourselves. We must depend upon others. 
We stand to-day like so many little chikken, whose 
parents have passed away. We can weep, but we 
don't understand it ; we can weep, but we must beg 
of you to give us a man who will still lead us for- 
ward until we shall have accompanied all those 
thousands for which he offered his life. 

]Mr. Mayor, I thank you for this. I have appeared 
in Faneuil Hall many times. If I was only able to, 
if I only had his tongue, if I could only thank him 
for Avhat he has done ; but I cannot : but such as I 
have, I give him. [Applause.] Mr. Mayor, I second 
the resolutions. 



HON. ALEXANDER H. RICE. 

Mr. Mayor, and Fellow-Citizens, — Amid the 
associations of this place, and of this hour, sur- 
rounded by these mourning emblems, and oppressed 
by this stupendous sorrow, my lips seek no utterance, 
and my lieart clings to silence and contemplation. A 
great life has indeed closed. 



332 ADDRESSES IN FANEDIL HALL. 

An illustrious career lias ended. For a moment 
the voice of discord is hushed ; and a stricken people 
bow before the majesty of Heaven to take the meas- 
ure of the nation's loss, and to forecast the future 
with its hopes and fears, its joys and sorrows. It is 
a time not only for mournmg, but for courage and 
resolution also. 

Our streaming eyes follow anxiously after the 
retreating forms of our departed statesmen, — of Lin- 
coln and Andrew and Sumner, and their illustrious 
compeers in council and in war ; and it behooves us 
to take up manfully the duty which they have left to 
us ; mindful that in the fierceness of battle, when the 
ranks are thinning, victory often hangs upon the new- 
born valor of the remaining few. 

Charles Sumner has departed. It is too soon for 
his eulogy ; too soon for his history. Our minds are 
full of his living image ; our hearts burn hotly with 
partial veneration and love. Memory throws back to 
us fascinating glimpses of his person and his charac- 
ter ; and a critical estimate of his worth is just now 
obscured by a suffusion of tears. We see, as it were, 
his commanding figure in our streets. We catch 
anew his genial smile of recognition ; and we hear the 
marvellous voice which now thrilled the Senate with 
denunciation, argument, or appeal, and again fell in 
the accents of sweetness and pathos in the circle of 
his companions and friends. 

In character he was a moral hero. In learning and 
experience he was a model statesman, — the gi-eat 
senator; always the friend of the oppressed and the 



ADDRESSES IN FANEUIL HALL. 333 

defenceless, the advocate of liberty for its own sake, 
and the tireless champion of human rights for all 
men. His forensic efforts had all the boldness and fer- 
vency of Chatham, combined with the classic purity 
and elegance of Burke, whom in countenance he so 
strongly resembled. Through a long career the 
advocate of an unpopular cause, at times the object 
of vituperation, and even of personal violence, no 
man ever assailed the sincerity of his motives, the 
blamelessness of his life, or his stainless fidelity. 

The taint of unfaithfulness never touched him. 
Suspicion found no lodgement upon the guileless sim- 
plicity of his deeds. He despised duplicity, and 
revolted at every thing that was dishonest. The good 
name of his native State was as dear to him as his 
own reputation ; and, in the discharge of his public 
trusts, his patriotism was the sure guardian of the 
national renown. 

No opportunity for personal aggrandizement, no 
solicitation of private gain, could swerve him from 
his sense of duty, or from his conviction of the re- 
quirements of the public welfare. 

In the contemplation of such a character, how 
grand is justice, how radiant is truth, how loval)]e 
is fidelity, how inestimable is personal honor ! I'o 
these there is no death. ]\Ir. Sumner, to a remark- 
able degree, exhibited his life, as it were, in duphcate ; 
for, while engaged in the activities of his career, ho 
seemed an historic personage. 

There was a breadth to his statesmanship which 
transcended the measure of his generation ; while Ihe 



334 ADDRESSES IN FANEUTL HALL. 

affluence of his learning supported it witli examples 
from the past, and pointed out the way of safety in 
the future. Even his conversation often bore the 
stately dignity of a message to posterity. With com- 
prehensive sagacity he discussed the philosophy of 
government in passing events ; and thus often antici- 
pated his peers in seizing and acting upon results 
which he believed would be ultimately certain, long 
before they had transpired. And thus he outran his 
time ; and, when the world overtook him, we ap- 
peared to be living only what had been already 
recorded. So exceptional was his greatness in this 
respect, that at times we saw in fancy his name 
already upon the immortal scroll, and his stately 
effigy in its appropriate niche in the temple of fame. 

He passed out of this world in the jnaturity of his 
manhood, in the triumph of the cause which he had 
so ardently espoused, blessed with the esteem and 
affection of his countrymen ; and his deeds and 
example will live forever, as potential forces, m the 
veneration and gratitude of posterity. Thus, in this 
world, is his mortality swallowed up in life. 

His spirit has gone to that higher Cofigress above, 
where the noblest and purest of earth sit together 
forevermore in the presence and love of that divine 
Father and Guide, who is none other than the King 
of kings, and the Lord of lords. O Grave ! thou canst 
receive of the departed statesman only another clod 
of thy kindred dust. O Death ! thou art roljbed of 
thy shining victory ; for again the holy declaration 
is fulfilled, and this mortal hath put on immortality. 



ADDRESSES IN FAXEUIL HALL. 335 

LETTER FROM VICE-PRESIDENT WILSON. 

Nattck, March 13, 1874. 

Hox. Alexander II. Rice. 

My dear Sir, — Your note is received, conveying to me 
the request of the committee appointed to invite sjieakers for 
the meeting in Faneuil Hall to-morrow. While I hope to be 
present, and listen to tlie voices of others, I am compelled to be 
silent. But no poor words of mine can deepen the aif ection and 
increase the admiration for, or add to the fame of, the illustrious 
son of Massachusetts whose sudden death the nation deplores. 
We have been friends for thirty years ; and i-t was my privilege 
to aid in placing him in the Senate of the United States, and 
to sit by his side there for more than eighteen eventful years. 
I have seen him in days of trial, disapi^ointment, disaster ; and 
in seasons, too, of successful triumphs; and I have witnessed 
his faith, hope, resolution, courage, and his tireless labors. In 
his death, impartial liberty has lost a devoted champion; the 
country, a true patriot and pure statesman; and republican in- 
stitutions throughout the world, a sympathizing and undoubting 
friend. He had lived to see the extirpation of slavery, and the 
triumph of the Union. But trials, disappointments, and sick- 
ness came to him ; but none but intimate friends knew how 
bravely he bore them. While, however, he greatly feared that 
. he might become incapacitated for labor, and further usefulness, 
he had no dread of death. Less than one year ago, while sit- 
ting alone with him in his room, giving him that advice — so 
easy to give, and so hard to take — to cease from labor, and 
take the much-needed rest, he said to me with great earnestness, 
" If my works were completed, and my civil-rights bill passed, 
no visitor could enter that door that would be more welcome 
than death." The failure to complete that allotted task was 
his regret in his last moments ; and the civil-rights bill lie com- 
mended to an honored colleague and friend. Loving hands will 
complete that unfinished work which the student will read, 



336 ADDRESSES IN FANEUIL HALL. 

and the historian, who would trace the great events of the last 
quarter of a century, will not fail carefully to study. And, as 
we bear him to his burial, may we not hope that his last in- 
junction will be heeded, and that the provisions of his civil- 
rights bill will be incorporated by the nation into its legislation, 
and that the " equality before the law," which was so long the 
inspiration of his unflagging efforts, may be assured to all, 
without distinction of race or color ? 

Very respectfully yours, 

Henrt Wilson. 



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